Things have been progressing with the latest build, albeit slowly, mostly due to summer conditions and some real bad humidity. Since the last post, the guitar body has been closed (tops and bottoms have been glued on, the neck joint has been chiseled out, and early preparations for the neck have begun. Perhaps we’ll focus this on bindings for the guitar which were interesting…..

For this one, I chose hard maple bindings with some varying light and dark purflings to break up the color between the maple and the body. The first step to this, and really, in my eyes, one of the most sensitive parts of building a guitar body is cutting the binding and purfling channels. For my builds, I hand cut the channels with gramils and chisels. I find there is more control and less opportunity for things like mistakes and tear outs when hand cutting. I use a set of two gramils…. one market for the vertical cuts, and one marked for the horizontal. I work in very small, methodical cuts which eases the pressure I need to put on the guitar to make a cut.

Once the channels have been cut, I work out the binding purfling pieces and patterns. For the bind/vertical purling pieces, I preglue the maple and patterned veneers and cut with the table saw to size.

Once done, I glue them into place. I first glue the top and bottom purflings into their channels, then follow with the binding strips.