Official Luthiers Forum!

One of the nicest things about this forum that I enjoy is that the members frequently celebrate their successes rather than dwell on their failures.

That said,
one of the hardest parts of building for me has got to be the binding.  On the last two instruments I built, I spent more time fixing terrible binding problems than I did routing the channels... And I did one quarter of the first one by hand.

Over labor day weekend, I build a lazy-Suzanne-drawer-glide router contraption.  Lo and behold, the darn thing actually worked!

Below are some photos of my first classical.
It is still in the rough and unscraped, but for the most part, I'm ecstatic even though there's a couple spots I'll need to deal with, like the purfling butt-joint on the top. 

One cool trick I tried this time around (this might be a bad idea, but it sure seemed to work well) was iron out the bad spots.  There were a couple places where the tape must have let loose too early and a gap existed between the binding and the body.  So I took the clothes iron  off the shelf (I build in the laundry room (yes, I know.... but in Minnesota that isn't necessarily a bad thing)), heated up the bad spots, drizzled in some thinned down AR glue and re-taped.  The bad spots turned out great!

So, here's to success.
Thanks for all the helpful tips to get this guitar here.

DAVE!

I know its not cool to need to do that much scraping, but I don't care this time around.  All of the binding and purfling were made from scratch.  I cut the binding from the sides so it matches perfectly.  The heel cap is cut from back material.  The purfling is a sandwich of maple and red-dyed veneer.  The top purfling has an extra layer of black fiber veneer. 
I think this guitar will be the peppermint dragonfly classical

Looks pretty good to me.  Can't see a thing wrong.  Congratulations on your progress. Great work.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

Hey, it looks great! Good job!

That looks really nice. I was thinking of trying to make my bindings from the side wood as you have. It makes a really nice effect.

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Allen R. McFarlen
Barron River Guitars & Ukuleles
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Cairns, Australia

good job!  I love the purfling also.. gives me some good ideas on my next builds.

Thanks for sharing!

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Reguards,

Ken H