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well, its crazy how much longer a task can take when you have a seven month old. ive been working on this for way too long now and im almost ready for binding. just doing the finishing touches and final tweaking of the fleishman/williams/white binding jig. the guitar is a carpathian spruce/peruvian walnut OM that will receive mad ebony binding and mac ebony fretboard and bridge.

i still havent quite figured out how to sharpen a scraper. i get more dust than i do shavings and im trying to level out the sides before routing for binding. judging from the really poor pictures i took, would you say that there is an excessive amount of wave in these sides? everything seemed quite square during the process of the build and i made sure to check often. it seems as though the sides bulge right in the middle along a good potion of the rim. all work was performed in an outside mold with 3 sets of spreaders. how perfect do they need to be in order to get a good binding channel and for it to not look funky under finish? any suggestions for leveling it out? thanks for looking.

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sweat the small stuff.

thanks for the tip todd. i will definitely go ahead and do some sanding (while i work on my scraper sharpening skills). i know when the sides were bent everything was square. i guess im just trying to figure out how things got so wonky so i can try and avoid it in my next build. thanks again.

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sweat the small stuff.

you mention the 3M gold and norton papers. is the type of paper critical to the finishing process later? or are you just partial to those papers? short of ordering on-line, im stuck with lowes, home depot and OSH.

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sweat the small stuff.

Heath my friend your guitar is looking great!!!

Before you do anything else chuck up a binding channel bit with the shallowest cut just beyond flush in that nice Williams jig. Forget about the ripples in the sides for now. Set the depth of the router to just take the edges of your front and back plate off and again deep enough to be just beyond flush.

Now using climb cuts first and then a complete pass take the plates out of play so that your sides are prouder than the top and back edges.

Now........ take a 4 X 6 block, Maple trued up on a surface plate works nicely bit any old flat block longer than the depth of the guitar works. As mentioned break the edges on the sides of the block and then sand the sides flat.

With the top and back plates not in play the sanding goes WAY faster. For the waist I use a 2" diameter dowel but anything round and rigid, within reason....., would work.

From what I can see in the pictures this should sand out easily.

Also the sharpener for scrapers from LMI or Stew-Mac works great if you don't already have one. Square up the scraper edge with a file, draw out the burr with the sharpener, and then use the sharpener to turn the hook and Bob's your uncle.

Now once the sides are flat and you use that Williams jig again you have already taken the top and back past flush and cutting the binding channels is easier because you have effectively now made multiple shallow passes first.

Good luck.

todd, thanks again for the sandpaper recommendations. there is a lowes literally two minutes from my house, so im glad they have paper that work well.

hesh, thanks for the tip on routing the plates past flush. not only will it make my life easier when sanding, it will also give me a chance to take this thing (binding jig) for a test drive!

on a related note... the binding im using is .080 x .250. how proud of the side should i leave the binding as to make my life easiest when scraping everything flush? on average how much does your binding channel vary in width and depth along the entire length of the rim? ill be using the williams jig pictured with about .250" of donut riding on the top/back respectively.

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sweat the small stuff.

What Todd said - leave em a bit proud and remember too that if you are using Titebond or LMI white for the bindings the glue layer will add about .005 as well which can turn flush into proud.

Also when making the initial test cuts with your Williams jig do so on the top of the top bout under where the fret board will go. A 1" long cut here permits you to dry fit your bindings (a cut-off piece of binding) in a place that won't show if the cut is too deep, shallow, what ever.

yeah, i think i will leave the binding proud and scrape it back for the reason you mentioned, todd. it seems like it be would less work anyways, right? i mean, scrape the whole side, or scrape the binding. scraping the binding makes more sense to me.

ive heard it mentioned that the upper bout of the back suffers the most from varying channel depth, just as you said. why is that? if the sides are square to the world, the back has a constant dome, and the donut riding on said back is adequately small in footprint, why would the depth be different?

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sweat the small stuff.

Heath buddy the top of the upper bout on the back is indeed an area that often suffers from bindings that are not as thick as on the rest of the guitar.

The reason for this has to do with why we need jigs like the Williams jig in the first place. In this area not only do you have the dome of the back that tries to tilt a flat bottom laminate trimmer back, hence making a shallower cut but in addition the upper bout on many guitar sizes/designs also tapers to a thinner side than say the lower bout.

If you were to look at a drawing of a guitar on it's side you would see that the top of the upper bout is narrower than say the butt wedge area.

This narrowing at the top increases the angle between the side and the back in this area and again some binding jigs and techniques end up with the laminate trimmer making a shallower cut, the binding gets installed more proud, that gets scraped off and you end up with thin bindings.

Recently our pal Barry Daniels corrected me when I said that I set up my Williams jig with the back level to the table that it is bolted onto. What Barry said was that instead I need to set up the guitar in the holder so that the sides on the upper bout, and everyplace else, are exactly vertical. Since the Williams jig registers off the sides this will keep the depth of cut consistent and you will get a more uniform binding thickness in this problematic area.

Barry is exactly correct too and again thanks to him for helping me to understand how to improve my own results.

And a great question from you Heath buddy.

Todd, What kind of vise or clamp are you using to hold the guitar in your picture?

Chris buddy here are the plans for the trojy by Rod True and they are excellent!!!

Thanks, sure looks like it's easier then squeezing it between the legs.

Hesh, would a .040" bearing(stew mac) work for this purpose or is that too deep? I'll be using .060" thick bindings.

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Jeremy Douglas

Keeping the sides vertical is to address the binding channel getting shallower resulting in thin bindings when viewed directly from the back of the guitar. Everyone want so to have their bindings a uniform thickness all around the guitar and this is what this is intended to address. The depth of the cut or the width of the bindings when viewed from the side of the guitar is a different issue and not what I was addressing.

I guess that I am not sure if the question was asking about the width of the binding when viewed from the side or the thickness of the bindings when viewed from the back.

As viewed from the back.

I was just wondering when you said "chuck up a binding channel bit with the shallowest cut just beyond flush" how shallow are you talking?

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Jeremy Douglas

Just enough of a cut to take the plates past flush with the sides. Also, since you are starting to remove material from the binding channel there is no harm in taking of say .030 - .040 during this initial cut. The benefit is besides taking the plates out of play when truing up the sides which needs to be done for consistent final binding cuts but you are also reducing the amount of wood that the laminate trimmer will have to remove during the final cut. This is the equivalent of making multiple, shallow passes and probably safer in terms of reducing the possibility of blow out.

BTW this idea is something that I learned from Mario.

I got it now. Thanks Hesh

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Jeremy Douglas

well, after making my initial pass with the binding jig, i can already see how this is going to make my life easier when trueing up the sides. now i know how uneven my binding channel would have been if i just went ahead and routed without making everything square. the jig works like a dream by the way. i just have to find a better way to attach the donut to the lexan base. i guess ill go ahead and bolt it (double sided tape is only a temporary means apparently). i can also see that there is about a .010-.015" variance in depth of cut in the upper bout as compared to the rest of the guitar. if i were to call that acceptable, how would that look to the eye when finished? too much?

thanks for the trojy plans by the way, hesh.

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sweat the small stuff.

Sorry to intrude...but this is a godsend!!!
Thank you!!
David

I can't download the plans because something is screwed up with my adobe 6.0. Thank God my new laptop will be here in two days.

May I humbly suggest setting your neck before binding the guitar...if you haven't already.

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"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

What's your reasoning on that Don? I've always waited until the guitar was bound to open the headblock mortise and set the neck. I do a final squaring up of the area where the cheeks will set on the body after it's bound and then mate em' up.
Terry

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

Great tips!

Hey, were you nervous on the first cut? I kept expecting the body to fall apart.

Mike

i havent even started building the neck yet. are you speaking of setting the neck angle or referring to the mortise in the body? this is my first so i really have no idea. i wasnt going to start on mr neck until later. would you care to explain further?

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sweat the small stuff.

i was only nervous because i had never used the jig before. i knew the cut was going to be very shallow so i wasnt too worried about it. now when it comes time actually cut the channel i will probably be a little more nervous.

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sweat the small stuff.