Finally...

Heh, putting strings on a guitar has an odd effect to it. I ended up wanting to play the unfinished guitar a lot more than I actually wanted to finish it. And that happened for about a month. But today, I finally set back down to work again. After a month of playing, I decided that even with the recessed bridge posts, the action was still too high.

Sorry. I had to.

So, I decided to recess the bridge into the body. Eh, not the typical thing to do with tune-o-matic bridges, but it has to be done to get the guitar to be playable. It wasn't until I researched Gibson style guitars that I realized what I was getting myself into using a tune-o-matic bridge with a fender neck. Here are a few pics from stewmac.com that explains it better than I ever could.

Fender

Gibson

So the bridge design is higher on a Gibson than a Fender. Huh. Well, that means I need to lower the bridge into the body. So, I dismounted the neck (again) and pulled out the bridge hardware.

I started out by making a template to route out the body so that the bridge would fit.

Then I routed the cavity out.

Then I re-seated the bridge. Easy as pie!