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Hi there,

Well now that I’ve calmed down over the blunder I had with the binding in the previous post, I’m going to get back at it here and start the final finishing of the binding.

For this next step which I found is very crucial to the finish, we need to scrap the sides down so that the binding and rosewood are even, level and true to each other. To do that I use cabinet scrapers. I’ve no idea why they’re called cabinet scrapers, I just know that they work very well and are very, very sharp. I picked up a whole set of different size ones at Lee Valley, as shown below.

So essentially, all that was needed was to scrape the excess wood down to an even surface. You can pretty much tell how far you need to go just by running the palm of your hand over it every once in a while. Here’s some pictures – the first you’ll see that it is mostly taking the white maple but in the second, as the level gets more and more level you can see it taking some of the rose wood.

Next time we’ll do the final step on the body (at least until we finish the neck), and that’s filling in all the itty bitty spaces.

Hi there! I feel rather guilty because I’ve been spending so much time making the Telecasters that I haven’t given the acoustic the attention it needs. Nonetheless I have got the neck to a point where I can now cut the angle where the neck joins the body. But before I got to that point I needed to do a few things…..

Firstly the trussrod channel needed to be cut. Now, I know that everyone I’ve seen do this uses a router and indeed I have tried to use one too – but what I’ve found is that the Mastercraft routers from Canadian Tire aren’t very dependable when cutting fine woods such as this. See, on the ‘01′ guitar I made, I went through three necks because the first time, the router depth gauge let go during routing which resulted in the channel being way too deep. The second time the bit came loose and once again went way too deep. After regaining my patience I tried a third time and the depth gauge broke. Patience lost.

So with all that in mind I decided to use my table saw instead. The only problem I faced is that the channel needs to be deeper where it meets the body and gradually shallower as it nears the headstock. I accomplished this with some shims I just taped to the neck.

So next I needed to dry fit the trussrod and see how it fit. I’ll tell you here, the trussrod I used I got from Stewart MacDonald (it needed to be sized to length and the end threaded). I really like this trussrod as it’s small, durable and easy to work with. So here you can see the rod just laying in the channel as a dry fit.

The only other thing I needed to do to it was drill out the hole that the end of the trussrod would fit into – see the trussrod itself threads into a brass cylindrical piece that provides the ’stop’ that the trussrod actually tightens against. I put the neck on the drill press, measured how deep I needed the hole and marked the drill bit. Then I carefully drilled it out. Here’s the results:

Next time we’ll fix up the binding a bit more.

OK so it’s been a while since my last post, but that’s solely because of other projects……

You see, Clark’s Guitars started out (obviously) with building acoustic guitars but considering how long this one has been taking, I’ve found that it’s just not a feasible business for replacing the money I make with roofing. So, long story short, I’ve decided to build electric guitars instead. If you haven’t already, check out this page: Clark’s Guitars Products Page

Now back to binding the acoustic, and the simple mistake I made that almost cost me the entire instrument…

Once the maple binding was in place, I was free to start sanding it level and smooth. The big problem here is that the binding cutter I used from Stewart MacDonald didn’t end up cutting the groove perfect – and if there’s one thing I’ve realized throughout this building process is that if it’s not perfect, it’ll look like crap. There were a few places where the angle just wasn’t right – this is likely due to the tiny, tiny roller bearing on the cutter that I needed to hold on to in order to keep it flat against the sides.

Here’s the cutter I used:

So in the end, after sanding, I had sanded right through the maple binding and into the perfling. You can see in the next image – in the areas where I sanded right through the maple, the groove was cut more like the left side.

Here’s the worst of the spots:

So what I ended up doing was cutting that section out and re-cutting it. What a mess. The pictures speak for themselves, so have a look.

After all of the messing around, here’s how it looks now: still not perfect but it’s better than it was.

I’ve learned a lot from this, and still may redo it again. Next time we’ll work a bit on the neck.