Sometimes, there just isn’t enough room to fit a JLD Bridge Doctor. To fit the Screw Mount version, there has to be enough room behind the bridge pins and the end of the bridge to accommodate the screw head. A Blueridge BG-60 is the latest acoustic guitar to not have the space – will the Brass Pin version work instead?

Just look at the size of the bridge – it’s so slim! The screw head has a diameter of 6mm so there definitely isn’t enough room to fit that behind the pins. That’s Screw Mount Version out of the question.

The JLD Bridge System is available, although it’s not ideal; because of the brass pin design, the string windings are going to sit over the saddle. Rather than the ball end of the strings being pushed into the body, they sit directly behind the pins above the guitar top. With a shorter distance between the ball end and the saddle, the windings end up sitting on the saddle. Not good!

Note: this only ever really applies to 6 string acoustic guitars. The JLD Bridge System was designed to be used for 12 string guitars with the brass pins being fitted on the second row of pins (further way from the saddle).

The Solution:

The only option then is to fit the brass pin version to the Blueridge BG-60 and use a set of the Short Winding Acoustic Guitar Strings. These bespoke Rotosound acoustic guitar strings are specifically made for the JLD Bridge System. The windings are about 10mm long, half of what they would usually be. As you can see from the photo below, once the strings are fed through the brass pins, the windings will not reach the saddle.

I’m really interested to see how this one goes. I’m sure I’ll follow up with another post about how the customer gets on with the installation.