First job of the night: creating the end graft. I decided use the same kind of zig-zag strip I used on the back as the end piece. I measured, scorched a few line with a  razor knife, and started chiseling out the channel to accomodate the strip. Not too difficult as long as the chisel is very sharp and you take your time:

And the result:

One of the things that scared me most when I read about guitar building was the stage that followed: routing the binding channels.

Binding, for those who wonder, is the material used on guitars to cover and protect the glue joint attaching the top and back to the sides. Both wood and various types of plastic/celluliod are used as binding material. Lots of nice pictures of various types of binding here at the acoustic guitar forum.

Every book shows different methods on how to route for binding. Youtube has a number of helpful videos, such as this one and of course, StewMac has an expensive jig for it. The scary bit is that you have spent ages completing a sound box and then having to take a router to it to create a little channel just wide and deep enough to accomodate the binding.

We use a Festool trimmer to route the channels, and to be honest, this was no where near as difficult as I thought. In fact, after the first pass, the rest was done in no time. Once the channels were created, the cream/ivoroid binding I use was installed on the back. The procedure is simple: put some Weld-On cement in the binding channel (about 3 inches at the time), put the binding strip in, and fasten with painters tape:

Here’s a picture of some guy with a receding hairline  installing his binding:

All done:

With all this done, I made a quick start on the bridge. The bridge I’m making will be a standard martin-type belly bridge. After selecting the rosewood bridge blank, I drew the contours of the bridge onto the wood, set out the string spacing of 2 1/8″ (i.e. the distance from the middle of the low-E bass pin to the high-E treble pin) and routed the slot which will eventually accomodate the bone saddle:

with the routed channel:

Next time I’ll be installing the top binding and purfling and hopefully do some more work on the bridge.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Building procedures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.