STRADPET Carbon fiber violin bridge

March 21, 2023, 7:36 PM · Stradpet makes a nice titanium chinrest bracket and I bought for its hypoallergenic properties. They also sell a lot of other titanium accessories touting sonic improvement. I can’t imagine carbon fiber would be better than maple.

March 23, 2023, 4:39 AM · The only CF violin I tried had a wooden bridge and bass-bar, so that any luthier could set it up.
It also had a wooden neck (painted black) because solid CF would be too heavy, and hollow CF would resonate.

April 1, 2023, 2:43 PM · Some time, last century, for his London College of Furniture diploma/degree, a friend of mine did a project comparing different woods for bridges (I was involved, because I played for him). The only material that conducted sound as well as maple was, I think, boxwood. Metal practically killed it.
I cannot imagine that a carbon fibre bridge would even compare with a maple or boxwood one.

April 2, 2023, 1:41 PM · Remember that "carbon fiber" refers to a range of substances.

Edited: April 2, 2023, 3:23 PM · But Paul, carbon fiber, as well as fake carbon fiber is all the rage. Doesn't matter whether or not it is appropriate for the application. (wink)

April 2, 2023, 4:43 PM · Two weeks ago i tested in a violin 2 almost identical bridges, one made of maple (not very hard...) and one made from boxwood.

The boxwood one makes the violin sound worse, especially in the "readyness" of lower notes.

April 2, 2023, 8:29 PM · Marco, I don't dispute what you say - In our experience boxwood gave as powerful a sound as maple and everything else was less powerful. We didn't look at quality.
Mind you, it may be possible to make a boxwood one sound better.

April 3, 2023, 3:04 AM · In the days when my young students played Lark VSOs, I pondered patenting a soft rubber bridge..

I read of CF-base materials which could imitate wood and be carved.

April 3, 2023, 4:33 AM · Carbon fiber is horribly unkind to traditional wood-carving tools.

Edited: April 3, 2023, 7:15 AM · David, I'm just saying that I wouldn't entirely rule out the possibility of some form of "carbon fiber" being suitable for a given application because of the range of properties, notably frequency-dependent mechanical response, that is possible. But I'd also be skeptical about ANY alternative material for a violin bridge.

The part I don't understand about CF violin bridges is that, unlike pernambuco, I don't think maple is scarce. And unlike violin bows, it's easy to keep your bridge from warping and easy to fix if it bends as long as it's only a little. So I don't see what problem CF is solving.

As for fitting the CF blank to your violin, no problem, just melt the feet a little with a match ...

Edited: April 3, 2023, 8:20 AM · Someone made up a nice pernambuco bridge blank for me to test. Since it's much heavier and stiffer than maple, I had to take away a lot of material to get close to normal specs, and then it was OK-ish. I liked the maple better, though. And carving pernambuco is a pain.

Carbon fiber is ungodly stiff and far denser than any wood, so matching normal bridge weight and stiffness would be a significant challange. Even so, I think it would sound "unusual" (i.e. bad), and definitely so if you leave it heavy and stiff.

Edited: April 3, 2023, 9:12 AM · Wood with different properties (density, stiffness) than maple would have to be shaped differently in order to have the same filtering effect. It is probably to make different kinds of hardwood work acceptably, but why would you? As Paul mentioned maple is not scarce.
I looked this carbon fibre bridge up on amazon and it looks like it is thinned on the side facing the fingerboard - probably pecause it would be much too stiff otherwise:

April 3, 2023, 12:40 PM · Carbon fiber is a man-made material (almost always used as a composite with other materials) with many useful properties within a limited range of applications.

Wood is a nature-made renewable composite, with thousand of years of experience behind it, both from evolutionary natural section, and human experience.

If I were building a race car, I'd probably use a lot of carbon fiber components. If I were building a violin, I'd probably stick with what has been most successful so far, and remains so even to this day.

April 3, 2023, 1:39 PM · Long time ago (‘70s) I was taken by a friend to meet a retired engineer in East Lothian, he had made a violin and had “updated” some features. As I recall the purfling was green and white plastic of some sort and the bridge was of conventional shape in clear perspex.
It all looked good and sounded not bad but had a rounded tone without any edge to it.