Tremolo errors

Hello again, it’s good to be back. Today I’ll be looking at the things I have learned during the process of making my first Tremolo. At first glance I thought it was a good effort, given my metal working skills were “0” at the beginning of the exercise.  However, there are several glaring (admittedly with hind sight) mistakes, all of which I intend to highlight and explain in this section. Lets look at a picture of the Tremolo in situ and use that as our main reference point.

the Tremolo

If you look at the picture above, everything appears to fit relatively well, that is until you take a closer look. I will begin with the adjustment bar.

In this case I have routed a slot to accommodate the adjustment bar in the body of the guitar, this seemed a good idea at the time, however, after completing the job I carried out a number of tests and found the following:

1     The bar moved when the Tremolo arm was depressed, this ‘play’ on the adjustment bar would no doubt have an effect upon the sound and tuning of the guitar as the bolts would suffer from undue wear and tear and would eventually come loose.

2     When I removed one of the bolts and tried to replace it I could not do so without opening the body up. This was due to the length of the bolts and the movement or play on the adjustment bar.

To resolve this issue I intend to fit the adjustment bar directly under and immediately behind the knife edge and shorten the bolts.

'Play' on the adjustment bar

The knife edge.

Having identified the problem with the position of the adjustment bar, I immediately realised this would require alterations to the knife edge. Looking once again at the first picture the problem becomes evident. To overcome this issue I will do the following;

(1)     The Knife edge will have to be re designed to accommodate the adjustment bar beneath it, this will mean that the screw holes will have to change position and be moved back from the knife edge by at least the width of the adjustment bar and to ensure they do not break loose, at least another ten to fifteen mm from the edge of the routed Tremolo housing.

(2)     Again, looking at the first picture, the location of the screw holes in relation to the Tremolo adjustment bolts is wrong. To resolve this issue I intend to make an alteration to the Tremolo itself. This brings us neatly to the next problem. 

The Tremolo

The holes I drilled in the Tremolo to accommodate the adjustment bolts are clearly in the wrong place. It is really quite obvious that in my enthusiasm to produce a working Tremolo I did not pay enough attention to detail. So the next Tremolo will take the locations of the screw holes in the knife edge into account, be placed a little closer together allowing the bolts should pass safely between the screws. I also intent to rout the slots to accommodate the adjustment bolts a little more ‘accurately’ and at a more realistic width. This will allow a little more of the Oak to remain, thus allowing adequate space for the screws passing through the knife edge.

Thats it, for now. Next time I hope to show some pictures of the second practice Tremolo I made.

See you soon