Today we were pretty busy at the Ocalenie Foundation safe space for children in the Ukrainian Refugee Reception Point / Humanitarian Aid Center in Przemyśl, Poland. We had about 25 kids signed in and some of them were pretty rambunctious. I guess they were “farm kids” because the boys had grime under their fingernails, and when I took out the tool kit to realign a slipped wheel on one of the bicycles, they gathered around to help out and I learned right away that they know how to use a crescent wrench.
Later in the afternoon things quieted down a bit, so I decided to take a crack at restringing our guitars. We actually have three guitars, but only one of them has strings. The bridge broke off one of the others, so there’s no longer any way to attach strings to it at all, and the third one is a steel-stringer which is also missing all the strings. The tuning pegs on that one are all shot, and I don’t like steel strings anyway, so I don’t want to mess with that one. But I decided to see if I could improvise a bridge on the other nylon stringer. I found a long, thin wooden building block in our stock of toys that is about the same shape and size as the bridge on a guitar and I used a small, sharp screwdriver to bore two holes through it — one hole to screw it onto the face of the guitar and another hole to thread a guitar string through. I decided to just try with one string initially, because it was difficult to bore the holes with the screwdriver. And for a talented artist, one string on the guitar is just right anyway.
The first attempt at using improvised bridge didn’t work out too well, because the wooden block I used wasn’t quite thick enough, so the string lay too close to the frets and would buzz against them whenever the string was plucked or strummed vigorously. But I added some shims under the string, to raise it up a little bit, and that helped. So it wasn’t a bad result for the first attempt, and the kids had fun playing it, even with just one string. If I can find some strong glue, I will try gluing the new bridge to the face of the guitar so it’s a stronger attachment than just a single screw. Then maybe I can even put six strings on it too (for those of us who don’t have Brushy’s panache with just one string).