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It was a lot of work, but I like how this turned out. The dust is just that; I should have wiped before taking the photos.

Don: Nice work, and you must have much more patience then myself.
Tom

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A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

YEAH, MAN!

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

really nice Don

Thanks for the comments! Yeah, it took some patience and tolerance for mistakes, but I learned a whole lot about how to do it, and it turned out nice. The next batch will be a lot easier.

Love it!

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wah
Wah-wah-wah-wah
Wah

Very very nice!

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guitarsbygiltzow.com

That is totally cool. Next time maybe make a little extra and then wander on over to the Classifieds.

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George :-)

Sweet!

That looks great! I'd love to be able to make that.

You sure do have a lot of strange stuff inside that guitar though. . .

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

George--

We'll see if I get more efficient and less wasteful next time. Maybe I will have some to share. Not with this batch, though. My learning process wasted a lot of expensive veneer.

It is a cool and fun project to take on. I encourage everyone to try it. If some hints from a master mistake-maker would be useful, I can post some. Like I said, I learned a lot.

It's my special Tardis Model. I guess I should have used blue veneer instead of red.

Ha!

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

Look fantastic.
I for one would love some tips.

I like it!
B & W gets tiring!

Mike

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Mike Collins

That is a absolutely beautiful job, Don! Looks flawless!
What kind of top is it? Holly for the white? You really must like red!

Haans--

Coming from you, that is high praise, indeed. I really appreciate it. The top is Lutz. The white is maple, but it does look a lot lighter than maple in the photo, doesn't it?

I do like red. My goal with this guitar is to do some traditional things, but in less usual ways. Hence, herringbone made with dyed red veneer.

Don

We don't see enough red in guitars - I think it is wonderful

Ed

OK, some suggestions on how to build custom herringbone:

First, buy the Bogdanovich book and videos. They are sooooo well done. I varied a bit from his instructions, because of what I was specifically building, and I have some other ideas as shown below, but he really does a great job of getting you going in the right direction.

As far as ideas from me instead of Bogdanovich, there are all sorts of things I learned, and I could drone on and on about it, but here are a few connected thoughts that I think are very important:

• Real wood veneer is more fragile than fiber. It is more likely to break under the same pressure that would bend fiber. So, it is better to bend it with heat than to expect it to bend cold.

• Multiple lines and/or pattern layers glued together straight are harder to bend than singles or doubles. Multiple lines might not break, but they can delaminate if you are bending with heat. In contrast, single lines bend very easily on a hot pipe, and (perhaps more importantly) a single veneer glued to a diagonal alternating pattern bends very easily without falling apart. In other words, if you have half of a piece of herringbone, minus the center veneer, it bends very easily without delaminating. But a full piece of herringbone can either break or delaminate very easily.

• Most of the uses for herringbone on a guitar call for bending it. Backstrips are the main exception. Rosettes and top purfling are the main uses, and those need it to bend.

• You are making this herringbone by hand, and you make it by gluing together the various layer components: Outside veneer, then diagonal alternating pattern, then center veneer, then mirrored diagonal alternating pattern, then outside veneer. It takes work to glue all of those layers together.

So, given all of the above, my big question is: Why glue all of those layers up in a straight line and then try to bend it all later? Why not bend the component parts that are easy to bend with heat, then glue them together after they have been bent on the pipe? This requires gluing molds, but those are easy to make. After that, installation on the guitar is very easy.

For the rosette shown above, I separately bent on a hot pipe these pieces:

• All of the single lines that make up the inner and outer rings.
• The single lines in the middle of the herringbone.
• The diagonal alternating patterns that make up the herringbone, each first glued while straight to its adjacent outside layer of veneer.

I then glued everything together in a UHMW rosette mold, cut channels in the guitar top the same size as the mold channels, cleaned up the glued up pieces a bit, and glued those three pieces into the top. Super easy at that point.

That's probably the biggest revelation I experienced in this process: Don't finish building the herringbone until after it is bent. I plan to do the same when I use it for top purfling. I built a little side-shaped gluing mold out of the same UHMW material.

I hope this is helpful.

Another hint:

Since the herringbone pattern calls for an outer layer of veneer adjacent to each of the diagonal alternating patterns, the easiest way to wind up with that component part (outer layer glued straight to diagonal alternating pattern) is to glue a layer of veneer to the appropriate face of your veneer stick, let it fully dry, square up the stick again, and slice off a thickness of veneer plus diagonal alternating pattern. This might be a little thicker than you will want it in the herringbone, but you can sand it or plane it to the right thickness. It will be the width of the veneer stick, but you further slice that up into 0.1" purfling sized strips. Keep track of adjacent pairs of these strips and you can book match them to try to get the lines to match up, but with all the bending going on, that is an elusive goal.

Wow...very cool. What did you use for the red? It really pops in the photos

The red is LMI dyed veneer, and the white is LMI maple veneer. Both are the thicker veneers (I think LMI sells two thicknesses). The sheets start out about 8 inches wide and 3 feet long. I think I may have found a less expensive source for comparable colors and sizes, but I don't want to recommend anything until I actually order some from the alternative source.

Thanks for the kind words, everyone! I was going for "pop," so it seems to have worked.

That certainly looks great to me.

The tips on making DIY herringbone are much appreciated. I'll have to try this sometime.

A few more hints from a master mistake-maker:

You need to decide how you are going to cut things up. You need to be able to:

Slice thin veneer into 1 inch wide strips
Slice thin veneer into 0.1 inch wide strips
Cut the veneer stick diagonally prior to gluing on the bias
Cut thin slices off the veneer stick
Cut those thin slices into thin, narrow slices (i.e., purfling size)

Bogdanovich uses a bandsaw, but he has a REALLY nice bandsaw. Mine is not as nice, and doesn't do a clean enough job for me.

A hand veneer saw does OK for slicing strips off of thin veneer sheets, but it can't handle the veneer stick after it is glued up.

Haans has posted in the past about using a Proxxon table saw. That might be the ideal tool. I don't own one (yet).

I eventually settled on using my 10" table saw with a 7 1/4" Freud Diablo 60 tooth fine finish blade and a zero clearance insert, along with some jigs. The Diablo has a 1/16" wide kerf, but the work comes off of that blade with a nice smooth surface, so sanding is less of a necessity. Combined with my Vega fence (a truly awesome fence) and some jigs, I was able to eventually get the cutting waste down to a minimum, and do so pretty safely and with good precision. The Proxxon would probably be better, but this is pretty good.

Glue: Folks tout Titebond 3 for this job. I trust their advice. I didn't get that advice, however, until most of the way through my experiments. I was using regular Titebond. It works fine. For actually gluing the finished component pieces together in my UHMW molds, as well as gluing the molded pieces into the spruce, I used hot hide glue. It worked great, and I love using it whenever I can. I am tempted to experiment in the future with using urea-laced hot hide glue for every part of building purfling. The problem with Titebond is that, if you have a gap somewhere, it is hard to fix that once the glue dries, because Titebond won't stick to dried Titebond. Hide glue cleans up way nicer, and you can fix gaps easier. Urea can make the open time more consistent with this job, and since this is not structural work, the glue doesn't have to be all that strong. Something for me to tinker with in the future.

My mantra during this experiment: Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. If there are mistakes to be made in this endeavor, I think I made them.

Again, I hope this is helpful.

OK, one more thought (I need to get this stuff out of my head!) about glue:

We might be tempted to think about the glue for this job in terms of what will be flexible when it comes time to bend the purfling strips. I suppose that can be a factor, but when I bend purfling, I feel like the glue holding adjacent layers together is as likely to just let go as it is to "slip" and re-adhere. I don't want it to let go. If I went to the trouble of gluing these piece together, I want them to stay together. So, for me, bending is about bending the wood the way it bends when we bend sides or solid wood binding. The inside edge of the bend is compressing, allowing the wood to take a shape other than straight. If I try to focus on that, it allows me to see how putting multiple layers together straight, then expecting them to bend together, is asking a lot of the wood. I feel like I am way better off bending thin strips to the shape I want, then gluing them together in the shape I want. Some of those thin strips that get bent are a few layers at a time, but in general, trying to bend 3 or more layers at a time is just begging for a delamination, or worse, a break. I am sure a Fox bender helps, and I am sure a better hot pipe bender than I can make it work. But why go to that trouble when you can bend, then glue in the desired shape? And if that is the case, then really, any glue you want to use is fine. You are not trying to bend and slip glue; you are bending wood that happens to have some glue on it.

Please forgive the fixation on bending then gluing, rather than gluing straight then bending. Working with real wood veneer, it made all the difference for me.