Acoustic Guitar Construction

Thanks, John.

Last night I finished making the inlay cavities for the fretboard, and used a good bit of ebony dust with a good bit of CA glue, and made a mess. I had to clean it up this afternoon.

Here's the before:



And after:



I got it down to 400 grit, sometime while the finish is sitting on the box, I will use micro mesh and see if I can make it shine better.

Bob

Fretboard looks nice. Good work Bob,

Kevin

Nice work on the fret board!

Yeah, the fretboard looks really nice. Love the binding and purfling on it.

Thanks guys. Fortunately ebony conceals mistakes well. I didn't make too many, but one of them had a significant chip-out.

After a week of fooling around trying to decide what to do for the tail wedge, I spent last night and today working on it. I had to order a jeweler's saw to make this one, and it finally got here yesterday.

I had one piece of gold mop left over from inlaying the fretboard, and cut a 1/8" x 1" piece.



I then cut a pocket on a small strip of ebony to receive the mop.





I had earlier cut the tail wedge shape into some cocobolo to match the binding, and drew in the ebony/mop inlay location.



The ebony and cocobolo were the same thickness, so I used a couple of passes around the rim of where the ebony would sit.



A little fine tuning and they all came together. I guess I hadn't thought all the way thru this, but the coco and the ebony are both pretty dark. I'm just hoping after putting on finish that the ebony will show up well. I wanted to set the mop in the center, but if I want to put a strap on this guitar, it might have been destroyed by the hole for the pin.



Next I applied the bwb purfling to either side of the wedge with some CA.



Routed out the channel for the wedge, and glued it in with white glue.





Tomorrow I hope to start routing for the binding and purfling channels. And I have a question - If I want to miter the purfling at the wedge with that of the horizontal purfling below the binding, what's the best way to go at that?

Thanks for looking.

I have 4 pieces of cocobolo for the binding, and 4 strips of b/w/b that will be mitered at the tail wedge. I tried using b/w/b before on the side without bending them because I didn't have the equipment. That was extremely hard to do as I had to use CA glue all the way around. Now that I have the bender, it's all much easier.



Now the bent binding and purfling sitting in the mold waiting for me to get to work.



Now I had a chance to use the binding tower that John Parchem sent to me along with the carriage that I had built. I'm going to tell on myself now. My understanding is that the sides need to be vertical when using the tower. I used my square to check the sides, and found that there were some places that just were not straight up and down. So I had to adjust the carriage several times to get the binding cut.



Even though I had inspected the channels thoroughly, I discovered after installing the binding that there were 2 places where the router had cut that were lower on the sides than they should have been. Part of that was because the b/w/bloodwood/w/b purfling was so wide that the router just barely sat on the top. So I went to my hand held binding jig. Somewhere in all that, I had those two places. I can take two pieces of very thin mahogany from my cutoffs and glue them in. It will be mostly, if not totally, hidden when I'm done.

This picture is the top being bound.



And some shots after the glue dried. I very carefully went over the binding edges with a chisel to pare down where the binding and purfling were proud of the top. I'll do the back later. It'll hopefully save time when trying to flush everything up.







Other than the two mistakes along the side (treble side), the binding/purfling is pretty well seated. Now it's just a matter of getting everything flush.

Finallly some progress. For some reason, I was skittish about using Zpoxy on a guitar. I watched Todd Stock's videos on it. I know people who use it and swear by it, but I was finding it hard to pull the trigger.

But I finally got started. Here are some pics of how it stands after one coat of the Zpoxy. I am really liking how this looks. Tomorrow I need to get some bolt inserts so I can clamp the guitar down. That will make the 2nd coat much faster to complete. This stuff really does make the wood stand out so well.





I'm skittish about spraying this as well, but unless it rains or the humidity whacks out this weekend I'll start doing that.
Bob