More finish tests

When I visited Wayne Henderson I told him I was planning to use natural colored Behlen's Pore O Pac pore filler, but tint it with dye, and he told me that he uses Pore O Pac, too, but he always uses the pre-tinted kind.

Well, my Pore O Pac filler was unopened so I took it back to Woodcraft and swapped for the mahogany colored stuff.

Now I'm wondering if it's too dark on my new test piece.





























Why didn't anybody warn me about how messy this stuff is?















By the way, here's how everything looks now all put together with the binding on.

Binding

I started doing the back binding last night and got the rest of it on today. I used the bike inner tube to strap it down, and titebond to glue the bindings. After removing the inner tube I started scraping the binding flush to the back and sides.

I like the look of thin binding.























































































































































After it was looking like the back binding was going to turn out looking really good, I did the same thing to the top.

Here's my gluing method.




























Here you can see the left side has been scraped and the right side hasn't been yet.



















I think it looks pretty good.

Routing for binding

Here's the setup I built recently for cutting the binding channels on the edge of the guitar body. I used a scrap piece of countertop for the surface that it all sets on. The cradle is built on the scrap from the mold I built for my 000 guitar, out of plywood. The tower is made from pieces of pine I had laying around. And the angled pieces that hold the laminate trimmer in place, are the offcuts from the radiused dishes I made out of fiberboard.





























The trimmer slides up and down on sliding drawer hardware. The whole thing cost a couple of bucks, except for the trimmer.




















The base of the trimmer has a disc made of slippery plastic, which rides on the guitar body. If you're looking for one of these, John Hall sells them.















Router bit sets designed specifically for cutting guitar binding channels are kind of pricey. To heck with that. I just bought a flush cut bit and then swapped out a different bearing to give me a 1/16" rabbet bit, for under $20.

I don't like to take any chances. I masked off the top, back and sides before cutting, to reduce chances of tear-out.



















The system worked like a charm. I got really good results.


































First I did the back.






























Here's how it looks after removing all the tape.

Stained mahogany with Indian rosewood

Here's how the binding looks against the stained test pieces. First is the body wood.





























And next is the neck wood.





























The whole guitar is going to have a pretty dark look, like the old ones look in the pictures. Having rosewood binding on the guitar isn't going to add a lot of contrast and make it look much different than a Martin 00-17 does.

The box is closed

Over the weekend my wife visited her brother and took the digital camera with her. So this, and the following posts, show all the progress I made in the past few days.

I glued the top to the sides, closing up the box. With my new radiused dishes, everything is much more accurate for me, than things were before.






























































For fun, here's how everything looks, with the parts all layed out.














Oooh...














Aaah...














Can you hear that? Shhh.














She's saying, "quit taking so long, and get this the heck over, so I can go home to Don and be played!"














I need to trim that nut, but I'll do that at the end.

































The plan next is to rout the body for binding, set the dovetail neck, finish, glue the bridge on, and setup. We're getting near the end, already. But I've been known to take my time with things.

Don gets his choice between bone and ebony bridge pins. What do you reckon he should choose?