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I have some quartered black walnut with some beautiful purple/maroon streaking in the grain that I might like you use on a bridge. Anybody ever try using walnut as a bridge material? What do you guys think? -Alex

Ovation used Walnut for years.
It's lite& strong.

Use it!
I would.
Mike

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Mike Collins

Ovation That's not exactly a great endorsement. . . but Walnut should be fine. I've used it but only on Nylon strung.

Trevor Gore recommends walnut for bridges in his books along with Australian Blackwood, Padauk. Perhaps he will chime in here.

Max

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Max Bishop
Brighton, Michigan

I use black walnut frequently on both classical and steel string guitars. Both have at least one layer of CF in and I've never had a failure. It seems Ovation don't bother with the CF and it obviously worked for them. It's a great wood if you want a low mass bridge.

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Trevor Gore, Luthier. Australian hand made acoustic guitars, classical guitars; custom guitar design and build; guitar design instruction.

http://www.goreguitars.com.au

As I recall it is high damping though. I like for a bridge to be as musical as it can be and still be light. Paduk would work and of course Brazilian. As cheap as bridges are and as important as they are I wouldnt use something just because it was laying around.

I use it because I can make really low mass bridges out of it and still have them strong enough, stiff enough and hard enough to do all the other things bridges have to do (support saddles, form part of the bracing structure, not get sliced up by strings, etc.).

The stuff I've been using is pretty low damping (an ear test), lower, I'd say, than the Aus blackwood bridges I've used, which have been on some of the brightest instruments I've made. So damping, as such, seems to be low on the list of priorities for a bridge, compared with the other properties I've mentioned above. If you want high frequency response, go light and you get it. It's very hard to do comparative listening tests with bridge materials without swapping bridges on the same guitar, which I've never bothered doing, because you'd have to make them of the same mass and stiffness as well. Now saddle materials, easy to test and they make an audible difference.

I looked up the log dec (another measure of damping) of black walnut as reported by Haines, J. Guitar Acoustics, #2, March 1981. He has it at 0.017, compared to BRW also at 0.017, one sample of each. Damping varies, of course, like all other wood properties.

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Trevor Gore, Luthier. Australian hand made acoustic guitars, classical guitars; custom guitar design and build; guitar design instruction.

http://www.goreguitars.com.au

I have a large inventory of Claro Walnut (Juglans hindsii). Beautiful wood, and as Fillippo mentions, it taps like cardboard. Maybe that's not fair to the cardboard. I haven't built any guitars with it. There's no way that the wood I have has a Q comparable to Brazilian Rosewood.

On the other hand, I heard a talk 35 years ago by an amateur violin builder who raved about Eastern Black Walnut (Juglans nigra). He was obsessed with tap tone. His favorites were Koa, and Eastern Black Walnut. Koa is certainly resonant--similar to Aussie Blackwood (which grows here too, and I have a fair stash). I don't have much experience with Eastern Black Walnut. Still, his reference point was Maple, not Brazilian Rosewood.

I think Torres made a point of using Brazilian Rosewood for the bridge, even when he economized elsewhere. Maybe Torres was superstitious. Maybe he had laid in a lifetime supply of bridge blanks early on, and was using what he had. I guess I'm superstitious too. Given the reputation of Torres' guitars, I'd rather monkey with the bridge in other ways before I choose a low Q wood.

My superstitions were reinforced when I worked for a small manufacturer of classical guitars. All of their models used Brazilian Rosewood for the bridge. At one point, there was a glitch in the supply chain, and a further glitch in quality control, and three of the high end models ended up with Pau Ferro bridges. Nobody knew. The sales staff didn't know the difference. But those three guitars hung on the wall, and were passed over by customer after customer until
the problem was Identified.

I, too, like walnut as a bridge wood. As Trevor says, you can make the bridge light and still have good stiffness, and that gives good high frequency response. I like to set the saddle back a little further from the front edge of the bridge than many people do, and that goes especially for walnut bridges. Instead of making the front of the slot 3mm back I make it 5. Also, using a back angle on the saddle really helps to reduce the splitting force on the top of the slot. Finally, with the lower density as compared with rosewood, you can make the footprint of the bridge a bit bigger, which really helps in keeping it glued down, especially on cedar and redwood tops. A can't think of any of my walnut bridges that have broken, split, or come unglued, but my memory isn't perfect, either, and I've been using the stuff for forty years.

A lot of the morado I've seen has been about as dense as African ebony. I only made one Classical with a black ebony bridge, and replaced it soon afterward.

I made a replacement bridge from black walnut about 40 years ago--in total ignorance, because I had it on hand, it was pretty, and it seemed like it would work. In fact, it DID work, and it's still working today. Of course, I didn't have access to discussion forums or other literature at the time. I just used it and was happy with it. I don't have the deep experience with materials that a lot of our members have, so I would say read Alan's post carefully. Then, use your walnut and see if it works to your satisfaction. It'll work fine, but see if it works to YOUR satisfaction. If not, it's a fairly simple matter to replace with something else.
Patrick

I can hear the difference between ebony, Indian rosewood and braziian bridges I have with the decreasing thud and increasing ring you would expect but I dont have a walnut one to compare.
I have been reading this forum many years and the impression I have had is that eastern black produces a guitar that sounds a lot like mahogany. Not trying to introduce a new topic but that suggests that damping is present similar to mahogany. Someone want to send a walnut bridge to me?