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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 12:31 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.