Work from 11/28 to 11/29/2008

With the body assembled I added the ebony end-flash and bound the top and bottom edges using ABS plastic.   The end-flash hides the seam at the bottom where the sides meet. The binding cleans up the joints, adds decorative elements to the guitar, and gives some protection to the delicate edges.  Some guitars have very complex binding schemes with multiple purflings and inlays.  Others are very plain utilizing just a simple black or white strip.  By right all the seams can be left unbound (ie. raw) for a real stripped-down, bare-bones look.  My personal Taylor 110E is bound with a single strip of 1/4″ wide black ABS.  For this guitar I decided on a medium-complex scheme: 1/4″ black plastic with a thin white/black accent with a matching end-flash in ebony.

I’ll be honest, I had originally wanted to bind the body in all ebony.  I even bought the strips to do it.  I tried to bend them on the hot-pipe after I had bent the sides but they kept breaking on me.  Ebony is a hard, brittle wood that’s hard to bend in the first place.  Second, the pieces I was sent were all short-grain.  That didn’t help.  So after gong through a tube of superglue and much swearing, I ditched what was left of the ebony binding into my woodstove and placed a last-minute order for the plastic strips.  Stewart-Mac had them at my house in 2 days.  Plastic bindings don’t need to be pre-bent and are just easier to work with.  In the end they’ll probably look pretty similar to the ebony…

Now with my plastic bindings in hand and the sides of the body scraped and sanded smooth, I set up my Dremel with the binding attachment and cut the rebates for the top and bottom bindings.  The attachment consists of a guide with a roller that makes the straight router bit make an even cut in the sides.  Simple but effective.  I set the depth of cut for slightly less than the height of the binding when laminated together and the width slightly less than the thickness.

Now I could install the end-flash.  I thicknessed a few pieces of ebony down to about a 1.5mm thick.  I need one piece for the end-flash and others for the future inlay of “Christy” on the headstock.   I resawed it oversize on the bandsaw and then sanded it smooth.  For the end-flash I cut a trapezoidal piece and sanded the edges dead straight and square.  Allowing for the white/black trim I then inlaid it.  I scored the edges with a knife and routed out the remainder.  I glued it and the trim with gel superglue.  After the glue had cured I trimmed the top and bottom to height and mitered the trim.

The individual strips for the binding (1/4″ black + 0.020″ white + 0.020″ black) were then laminated together into the final binding.  They’re glued together with a little acetone applied with a brush to each mating surface.  The acetone partially dissolves the plastic on the face of the strips and welds itself together.  I made a simple jig to press the pieces together.

The binding was then glued on using a special glue made for plastics called “Weld-On.” It’s very thin and you don’t need much of it.  The binding is held on with special high-tensile strength but low tack masking tape.  Regular masking tape could have pulled fibers from the soundboard. I worked in 6 inch sections, starting with the special miter at the end-flash.  I let it cure overnight.  The next morning I pulled the masking tape and leveled the binding flush with the top/back and sides using a sharp card scraper.

Now it’s staring to look like a guitar.  If only it had a neck…