Acornhouseworkshop

The binding is done. As I’ve mentioned before, if you ever want to get a lot of hand tool practice, build a guitar. With binding work, a well-sharpened card scraper is a must. Its funny how the bends change the wood’s nature. Regardless of the wood’s grain, it wants to be scraped uphill. The top bindings turned out much better than the bottom bindings. Whether that was because of the practice I got doing the bottom first, or the purfling, which, being softer than the maple, acts as a cushion to conform to the top better, I don’t know. Maybe a combination of the two. Here is a close up of the binding/purfling combination. The purfling I used was w/b/w (white/black/white) which is made from a flexible cardstock type material, standard for the trade. Its gives a very subtle delineation between the maple and the spruce.

And the totally bound body.

The last steps before finishing are: add a filler to the fret ends (the slots are always a little deeper than the fret’s tangs); adjust the neck’s shoulders at the tenon, so that it sits at the correct angle with the body; do a final sanding  to 320 grit; and mask off the areas where the bridge and the fingerboard will be glued to the top after the finish is complete. This last step has to be last, so that the scale length (distance from the nut to the bridge’s saddle) is perfect. If the bridge is to close to the neck, or too far, the intonation will never be right – the guitar will always sound out of tune when playing anything other than an open string. Can’t have that, can we?

This entry was posted on September 30, 2009 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Acorn House. 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.