Guitar restoration - Part 5 - The reborn bridge

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With both the neck and the body in a better shape, the work continues. Ordering would take ages (one month or more), and I really would like to take this guitar repair as a challenge of May, I decided to try to "fix" the old bridge.




Started off with some bridge designs I have found online, marked the saddle slot and the curves with a pencil. The design is heavily inspired from the fairly standard bridges, but with the constraints I had from the string holes and the bridge size.
After the "design" being ready, started sanding off the finish, then reshaping the bridge to a more "curvy" bridge and touching up the parts where the strings have cut into the wood. I decided to mount it backwards compared to it's original state, so with the string holes facing away from the soundhole, and not towards it, wrapping around the bridge.

 


 
The end result isn't perfect, as I didn't want to sand too much from the middle part for it to be still strong enough to hold the strings, so the string holes are not perfectly lined up, as you probably can see. But regardless of this I am fairly happy with the result it looks nice, and fits the sanded-down body and fretboard perfectly. I'm worried what finishing will do with the different woods, and how much their colour will change (tried boiled linseed oil on a piece of spruce, and it did darken it a bit, but I don't have any bridge material to test BLO with, and even if I did have, I don't really have too may options for finishing).

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