Back At It

After two weeks working on the house, I finally have some time to work on the guitar. The den is painted, and the furniture put back in order, but we are going to put some wood trim up, possibly next week, so we're not quite done.

On the last guitar-related post, I routed the ledges for the binding and purflings. Before anything can get installed, the bindings and purflings have to get bent or else they will break. For the thin white/black/white purflings bending is just a matter of soaking them in very hot water for just a minute, then taping them on the guitar with blue painter's tape. When they dry the hold the shape.

For the wider decorative purfling, the hot water works pretty well, but since I have to get out the pipe and blow torch for the bindings, I use this to bend them. Once again I tape them to the guitar body and when they are cool they retain the shape.

The rosewood bindings that I bent when I bent the sides came out all right, but the non-cutaway bindings need some touch up. As for the cutaway bindings, there was more cracking than I originally thought, so I ordered some more and bent them on the pipe. It's a painstaking process, but it works. There is just a little splitting on the horn of the cutaway, but it's shallow and will be sanded away.

It actually took me a couple of nights working with the bending pipe to get everything ready to be glued. First to get glued is the b/w/b purfling that will go underneath the rosewood bindings. Then it's the decorative purfling that is inlayed on the top and the back. In this picture the purflings has already been glued on the top, and I'm getting ready to glue it on the back. Since the glue sets fairly quickly, I have the blue tape ready so I can just grab each piece.



Everything is glued and ready for an overnight dry. It doesn't need this much time, but it was late and I was ready to go in for the night.


Here's a close-up of the purfling. You can also see the b/w/b purfling on the side and the channel waiting for the bindings.


You can see now why I needed to do three routs per side: one for the decorative purfling, one for the binding, and then a final one to deepen the binding rout to accomodate the b/w/b purfling. I wouldn't have needed this third rout if I planned to continue the b/w/b all around the butt, but I intend to stop at the butt-wedge and miter the purfling, which gives a nice effect that I'll show you when we get there.

Gluing the binding is more complicated, so I'll get to that in a later post.

It's good to be back. Hope you missed me. If so, tell Pam that the house looks great and doesn't need any more painting. :)