Guitar Number 26: 6th Installment — Binding

It’s time to install the bindings on the guitar. I glued a veneer of red-dyed holly to a strip of thicker applewood for my material.  The bindings are then cut on the band saw. This fence utilizes a magnet at each end to clamp to the table — twist to activate the magnet, reverse to deactivate it — very handy.  A piece of 1/4″ plywood run through the cut and then taped in place creates a “zero-clearance” throat opening to prevent the thin binding strips from snagging in the throat opening.

After each cut, a couple of passes with a plane on the shooting board gives one smooth surface to each strip of binding.

I am also using some black/white strips for purfling on this guitar. They were too tall as supplied so I needed to reduce their width a bit.  I did all at once with this little planing jig which is essentially a clamp that holds the strips tightly while supporting them for planing.  The jig is two halves joined by a spline that aligns the two halves and creates a floor to support the purfling strips.  Three screws supply the clamping pressure.

The bi-color shavings are sweet!

I use “economy” packing tape” (the thinner stuff) to hold the bindings in place while gluing them on the guitar. It has a nice stretchy clamping action to it and I like the fact that it’s transparent and I can see how tight the joint is. The guitar is supported by a vacuum clamping jig which holds the guitar steady for both the routing and gluing phases of binding installation, while also giving unencumbered access.

This view shows a bit more clearly what’s going on with the jig. Each suction cup is on a post that can be adjusted for height. This allows me to get the guitar sides as perpendicular as possible to the jig base. That will come in handy for routing the binding channels when I one day make another jig to hold the router that will slide around on the vacuum jig base

Coming down the home stretch here with the binding and trying out the binding tape supplied by Stewart-McDonald.  It does the job well, but I still prefer my packing tape.

Here’s the completed binding and purfling job scraped clean:

Until next time!
df