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I'm just a little curious here... On a steel-string flattop, why is a regular pinned bridge generally preferred over an archtop style bridge in combination with a tailpiece? In my newbie mind, a tailpiece would allow lighter top bracing and a lighter bridge. I suppose two potential downsides are that the break angle over the saddle would be lower, and the strings would not be anchored to the top. What kind of impacts will this have on the tone of the guitar?

Hey Sondre, I was waiting for some of the more experienced builders to weigh in here with the technical explanations of why the pinned bridge has won out over the tailpiece on flattops. I won't get into the theory since I've only finished build #7, but I did just finish a flattop with a tailpiece that works great. Here's the thread, viewtopic.php?f=10101&t=22463.

I think there is a valid place for them with a lightly braced top. There were a lot of them built in the 20's and 30's, and a lot of them weren't very good, but I think it was mainly that they were very low end guitars anyway. Some of the higher end 12 strings from that era were great, making use of the tailpiece to transfer the higher tensions to the tailblock, and Todd Cambio at Fraulini guitars is building some great tailpiece models, check out his website.

So I'm definitely going to be exploring this area further, jump on in and let me know what you find out.

Joe

I've seen some quite heavily built guitars with tail pieces and the top has started to collapse in that area, the builder is a bit of a butcher, screws holding on necks etc but he gives me free wood, and sandpaper and stains etc from when he made snooker tables, so i won't complain!

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Formerly JJH

I learn more from my mistakes than my successes

Joe, that's one cool guitar! How would you say it sounds compared to a similar guitar with a traditional bridge?

Thanks Sondre!
I really can't answer that because this guitar's top is braced totally different than anything I've built before. So I can't separate the effect the floating bridge has from the new bracing pattern. The tailpiece/floating bridge idea just seemed like a good choice for this box as I was getting it together to string it up. If it hadn't worked out well, I would then have switched to a pinned bridge, with only some screw holes in the endblock as a penalty. So it was an intuitive gamble that paid off.

Sometimes you just have to take a chance, but it will take more builds to isolate the effects of this bracing and the floating bridge.

Joe