Wood or acrylic resin? Or both?

jkz

New member
I intend to convert one of my floyd rose guitars to hard tail, likely a wraparound bridge. I'm going to completely fill in the entire trem hole including the back spring cavity.

Should I use:

1) pine wood blocks, sawn to size and glued in, or
2) acrylic resin, poured in and set,

or even a fanciful idea: 3) acrylic resin, with cores of wood encased within?

One consideration is that the new bridge has to be partially screwed onto the filler material. Will really appreciate everyone's thoughts on this, thanks! :)
 
I advise you to just get a separate guitar altogether. For one, the neck angle on floyd rose equipped and hard tail guitars are different which may lead to intonation/playability/tuning problems. String spacing on the new bridge may also be a problem too.

But if really die die must do, only way is to use a wood block. Any form of filler be it acrylic resin, wood expoy which is actually what your 3rd idea is called, or even fibreglass used to patch boats will shrink over time and you'll have a gap surrounding the patched area. What happens is the wood and filler expand and contract at different rates hence the filler detaches itself from the body over time. There are pics on the net that show this phenomenon and it IS unsightly.

Don't mess up a perfectly good guitar just to experiment. :wink:
 
as almondx said, use the wood block of the same material as your guitar, not just pine. you'll like run into stability and resonance problems with the acrylic resin.

it's quite alot of work, make sure you get the bridge alignment absolutely spot on. neck angles and such can be dealt with.
 
dude it'll be more worth it to get a new guitar with fixed bridge. as stated, it'll be quite tedious to adjust the neck angle, and measuring the intonation of where the bridge should be according to the scale of the neck.

however, if you really insist on converting the guitar, i'd go with the wooden block cut down to size and glue into place. be sure to use hard-enough wood though.
 
If u do not want to get a new guitar
get just a new fixed bridge body only
recycle the electronics and neck etc
can sell your floyd rose routed body to recover the cost.
 
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