Fitting a bridge

I struggled to find a good bridge for sale online. There are lots of violin bridges for sale in places like ebay but I wanted to make sure I received a good quality bridge. So I went and asked at my local music shop (JG Windows) to find out if they sold them.

I thought the advantage of going to a shop in person would be that I could look at various bridges and pick the one I liked. I was told at the shop that they didn't have any violin bridges in stock however another one of their shops did sell them and they would be able to arrange for a selection of bridges to be sent their the shop for me to look at. They did just that and I went back on Saturday to have a look at the selection of violin bridges.

I purchased this bridge by Teller, it cost £3.50 which I thought was a very good price. Bridges are generally stamped with little pictures of trees or stars to denote the quality of maple used. These markings range from zero to three. This one had two stars and I was happy with that. They did show me an Aubert bridge which had 3 stars but the price was £15! so I went for just the two stars instead.

The bridge was pre-cut as it had grooves for the strings already cut into it but it still needed fitting to my violin to make it optimal. The first thing I did was to use sand paper to reduce the thickness of the wood near the top edge to make it ever so slightly more responsive to vibrations. In the picture below the top image is before sanding and the bottom image after.

I then had to shape the feet of the bridge to fit the curved shape of my violin. I did this by placing some sand paper against my violin and slowly and gently rubbing the bridge against it until the feet took on the profile of my violin.