With the finish line in sight, I expected that last week’s session would end in me taking the completed guitar with me to have it sprayed with lacquer. Things turned out a little different…

The last four or five frets on the fretboard extention (the ‘ island’ of the fretboard that resides above the guitar body) hadn’t been seated properly. Why I hadn’t noticed this before I don’t know, but the frets ends were clear of the wood, and a piece of paper could easily be slipped underneath the fret. Not good. And because the slots were too shallow, trying to hammer them in any further was useless. So, we had no other option left than to remove them…

Ebony is very brittle. We were left with quite a few chips missing around the fret slots after the frets came out. These gaps are filled with black shellac from a stick (like this) and sanded back. It should be mostly invisible. I hope this was the last set back before I can take it to the finishing shop.

These last stages of the build are not particularly interesting for my audience. I do apologize.

Apart from shaping the neck, I’ve been sanding. And sanding. And sanding some more. This does mean, however, that the guitar is about ready to be finished! And I’ve decided that that’s not something I want to do myself at this stage for a couple of reasons. First of all: I like nitro cellolose lacquer finishes. Unfortunately, nitro is not very nice to work with. In fact, it’s pretty toxic. And with no prior finishing experience, no spraying booth and a couple of small kids around the house, it sounds exactly like something best left to a pro.

Secondly, after having put a year and a half into this thing, the last thing I’d want is for me to screw up the finishing. So, I’ve found someone who’ll do it for me and hopefully I’ll be able to drop this guitar off at his shop in the next couple of weeks or so. After which I have to wait for six long weeks for the lacquer to cure. Then it’s ready to be stringed up. Can’t wait!

In the mean time, time to start work on #2!

The last bit if real hard work is underway. I’ve started to shape the neck:

So, what was once a straight piece of wood is slowly but surely becoming something that resembles a guitar neck. Pretty cool. This does take quite a bit of practice and after all of the nightmares I’ve had with this thing the idea of screwing up is really quite daunting. So, I’m definitely taking this one slowly…

Now what we almost have a guitar, it needs somewhere to live. So I settled on a nice Hiscox Artist Pro-II OM/000 sized case which should be arriving soon.

More next week!

With the fingerboard now glued to the neck I was ready to give it its radius. The fret board is not flat, so using a 16″ radius sanding block, I went through a whole range of sandpaper: starting at 80 grit and moving through 120, 180, 240, 320, 400, 800, 1000 and 1200. The result: an ebony board, silky smooth to the touch. I also filled the little gaps around the fingerboard inlays (especially the one at the 12th fret) with black shellac. Not as flat as I would have wanted, but good enough for now.

Next up: fretting!

After cleaning the slots and adjusting the depth mostly at the sides because of the newly sanded radius, the frets were hammered in.

This really does look like a guitar, doesn’t it?

Next time: the last thing to do before it time to do the setup: shaping the neck. The shape I´m after is what I have on my martin D-18V, which sports a so-called modified v-neck. more info on these shapes here.

This journey is slowly but surely moving into the final stages, but I haven’t taken a lot of photos of the last few sessions. One major accomplishment: the fretboard has been glued onto the neck.

Next up: shaping the neck, which is probably the last of the bigger woodworking jobs. After that: hammering in the frets, crown and polishing them, glueing the bridge, install the tuners, sand it as smooth as a baby’s bottom and do the setup.

And then…  finishing it with either nitro or KTM-9.

I forgot to take pictures at the last session, but a quick update:

the neck will not be bound. It’s time to finish up on #1 so I’d rather settle for a smaller neck than run into issues with binding again. As a result of this decision I had to make a new bridge because the original one was drilled for string spacing for a slightly wider neck. Using that one would result in strings running off the fretboard at the high frets.

I did some inlay work at home on the ebony fretboard, slotted diamonds as position markers and a fancy leaf inlay at the 12th fret:

More diamonds to be added at the 3rd and 14th frets. It’ll be glued onto the neck this week.

The Sunday night was spent with a jeweller’s saw, needle files, a nice mother of pearl shell blank and a lot of patience.

I ended up with a nice logo to inlay into the headstock:

MOP headstock logo

Finally, the binding job is finished! This was definitely a nasty experience: the last post still showed the the half-herringbone purfling strips installed. We had to route those out because of the glueing disaster with the Weld-On cement, but when we bent a new set of these purflings, they came out twisted from the bender! Argh.

I decided to do the sensible thing and install simple black-white-black purflings. Finally, these came out perfectly with the new ivoroid binding installed. We ended up using CA glue for the job, which did the trick nicely:

Binding done!

Next up: scraping! No pictures are available of the hours I spent scraping the binding flush with the sides, but the result is really quite good.

I’m now moving into the final stages of the build, and things are really coming together. There’s a bridge that need shaping:

rough bridge

And the neck, which I haven’t really touched in months, is fitted to the sound box:

A guitar!

Getting a really tight fit is crucial. At close inspection it turned out I had been a little overly enthousiastic when sanding and scraping the binding near the neck pocket. This area takes a bit of a dive forward, as a result of which, I’m left with a slight gap between the neck and the sound box. Some more scraping’s in order to fix this.

Having roughly fitted the neck, I moved on to positioning the fret board. This is done by aligning this on the neck and drilling four tiny holes through the fret slots on the tenth and fourth frets. By putting some tiny nails through these I have achieved a fixed position for the fretboard on the neck.

Here it is in all its glory:

Next time, the fret board will be glued to the neck, and I’ll work on finishing the bridge.

So, as discussed in the previous two posts, the last sessions were spent on installing the binding around the edges of the guitar. The result on the top was pretty spiffy:

Top with binding and purfling

Cleary visible in the picture is the residue from the glue. So I got to work with the trusty cabinet scraper to remove the glue, and scrape the binding flush with the sides.

All went well for about five minutes until just about half of the back binding came off! As it turned out, the combination of the glue, the binding material and the rosewood was an unfortunate one. They simply hadn’t attached properly. At closer inspection, the top binding and purfling also didn’t stick. Disaster! Two nights of work gone (a month!), and I was left with a soundbox with messy binding channels filled with dry and hardened glue…

After the Great The Weld-on Disaster

Only one sensible option here: route the channels clean and start over… After cleaning up we opted for a different ivoroid binding material and used CA (super)glue instead of the Weld-on cement. A test piece showed it stuck properly so by the end of the night, the new back binding was installed. Look two posts back for pictures, it looks much the same.

Definitely a shame, but in all honesty, the new binding material looks better and I managed to install it much cleaner. Fingers crossed for next session and let’s hope this was the last surprise for this guitar.

Lets start by looking at the result of the last session. After peeling away all the tape from the mummified back of the guitar, it looks like this:

Ivoroid back binding

I think it came out nicely, overall. Once the top binding has been done, all the glue residue will be removed with a cabinet scraper. At that stage I’ll also scrape the bindings flush with the body.

But first, more of the same to be done on the top! I already routed the two channels which are needed for this part of the job, using the same Festool router we used for the back. It turned out that the purfling channel was a bit to shallow so I adjusted this first.

Next stage: bending the purfling strips. These small strips of laminated mosaic need to be bent to the shape of the guitar before installing them, so on to the bending iron they went. Of course, these are much easier to bend than the sides of a guitar so it was done in a matter of minutes:

Bent purfling strips

On to installing the binding and purfling. This is a little more challenging than doing just binding alone, because both strips made of different material have to be glued in tight at the same time. This takes practice, steady hand and lots of painters tape:

Top binding and purfling installed

A preview of the result I’m aiming for:

Preview of the finished top

Next session: shaping the bridge. Also, Ive decided I want to bind the fret board (like on this D-42). This will give me the necessary width of the finger board because at the moment the string spacing is a tad on the small side, which the binding will fix.