Boundless

Uh oh.  Dad's got the fringe out again...

I see tape fringe!  That can mean only one thing.  Daddy's gonna have a good time tonight!!!

...ahem...

Sorry. Wrong blog...

But seriously, it's time for more binding (yay!).  I decided way back that I wanted to bind this Les Paul style neck - including the headstock.  So, here we go.  In a previous post, I discussed how I needed to make a channel for the binding to sit in.

57 Channels and nothing on

Also in a previous post, I talked about making binding paste...

Mmmmm... Death Chicklets

The joy of watching plastic melt...

Death Chicklet soup...?

I've also talked at length about working on plastic binding: here, here, and here.

Always the same:  It's picture day and I have flyaway binding

So what more is there to talk about?

Not much.  I just thought a post of nothing but pictures would be a bit boring.

And I thought the blog would be a bit dry without my pithy observations.

Something pithy

But in truth - here's the bit I wanted to get to: The headstock.

Binding the neck isn't really that new and different.  If anything, it's easier than a guitar body because it's pretty much a straight run of binding with no curves.  Until you get to the headstock.

Curvy you say?

The headstock was the reason I needed to bind the neck over two days.  Day one was the neck and the big curves of the headstock.  Day 2 was for all of the little curves.

All wrapped up and nowhere to go.

So, after Day 1 we are left with this:

No, my workbench didn't magically turn into polished stone.

After all the tape was removed we had this: 

Ladies and gentlemen - my kitchen floor

If you look closely you can see that I cut the binding too long - so I need to trim it.

*Blink-Blink*
And we're back in the garage.

Take some snips and cut the binding to the correct length and you are left with this:

That middle bit is going to be a problem

And this:

And this is gonna make the guitar look better how?

And this...

Son of a...!

So, remember when I said there was really nothing new to report about doing the binding on the side of the neck.  Yeah, I lied again.  Lying liar that I am.  What happened here?  

I was pretty surprised myself.  I must have pulled the binding in the wrong direction when I taped it down because I was about a half inch short.  And by the time I realized this the binding was mostly done - so it would have been a real pain to redo.  So, I slapped another small strip on there and we'll work on it.

Lil' bits

Day 2 working on the neck was to affix the little bits.  Now there is a reason I split this process over two days.  To make these pieces blend seamlessly with the larger bits you have to trim, sand, and pre-fit them.

Unless you actually know what you're doing and then you do this in one night...

I started simple with the small piece that goes on the butt of the neck.

Heh, heh.  He said butt!

Then I tackled the top of the headstock.  On a traditional Les Paul guitar, the final profile or shape is supposed to look like an open book.  Which means I'm going to have to do something about that peak in the middle there.

Binding gives you wings!

Since we use anthropomorphic terms for guitars (neck, body, head-stock) this last part here would be the what?  Jowls?  Adam's Apple? Lymph Nodes?

Caressing the guitar jowls
...ew

Anywho!  All these pieces were cut to fit.  And in the few cases where they were not an exact fit - I used a bit of extra binding paste to cover my mistakes.  It's not like that went poorly the last time I tried that trick.

Then I waited overnight and on day 3 scrapped that sucker.

I will mention again that I use both a cabinet scraper and a utility blade to scrap bindings.  This time out I also tried using a 1/4 inch chisel.  Which worked for the area where the nut will go as that is harder to scrap or snip.

After a rough night on the town

After a shower and shave.

Scraping turned up a few blunders.  I kind of thought this one might not be a tight fit as I taped over it.  But until you take the tape off it's hard to know either way.

Heisenberg's lesser-known experiments with binding.  No dead cats required.

And I knew the top of the headstock was going to need a solution.

Pictured: Unresolved issues

Buth otherwise - it's starting to look pretty good

Pictured: Pretty good

Seeing as this neck started out life looking like this:

So, I've had some work done.  So what?

I mixed up a small batch of binding paste and filled in the cracks.
Once that's dry we'll scrap again.

A little schmeer...

And now we wait for Day #4

What could possibly go wrong?

Coffee, Sand, and Grains

Oh la la!

The job of getting a guitar body prepped for finishing is a funny thing.

As you sand one area - you find another area that needs to be rescraped, that superglue you used to fix a bit of binding is going to cause havoc with the staining process, or you realize a seemingly harmless mistake you made five steps ago is now going to impact you going forward.

I’m sure if I was a more fastidious craftsman - this wouldn’t be this hard. There would be fewer mistakes to correct. But I’m not - so here we are.

I know there are a few more steps to go before I’m ready to actually finish (as in put a “finish’ on the guitar body) but I’m gearing up for it. Now is the time you really want to clean up after yourself. Here’s what I’ve been doing.

Gritty

Smooth

Sanding: Me and the sandpaper are getting reacquainted. I like this process - so it ain’t no thang. At this point I am using 150, 220, 320, and 400 grit sandpapers to get the body smooth enough for a transparent color with a semi-clear finish coat. I’ll be using dies, shellacs, wood fillers, and nitrocellulose lacquer for my finishing process. I’m going to go over these steps in detail as we get to each stage but that’s what’s on the horizon. And to get the body ready for that - the wood has to be prepped to accept all of those processes. So, we sand.

Doing dishes, sanding guitars.  It's all the same.

I found this little trick by accident. Wrap your sandpaper around a sponge (or in this case a scotchbright pad) and have it stick out a bit. The binding wood - cocobolo - has a tendency to discolor the wood next to it when sanding. The scotchbright not only gives the sandpaper some rigidity but it keeps it away from the cocobolo and polishes the cocobolo to boot.

Hello darkness my old friend...

Scraping: I’ve found that the glue that I used to adhere the binding squeezed out in more places than I originally thought. These are tiny tiny tiny things that you can’t see normally but once you put a finish on the guitar - you will see them. The glue seals off the wood from the finish - so those spots look much lighter and brighter than the surrounding wood. So, we scrape the squeeze out out!

It is amazing how much time you can spend just going over the body millimeter by millimeter looking for this kind of stuff to fix.

I'll have a vanilla

Staining and Grain Raising: Way back when I started this guitar I was hemming and hawing about whether to use coffee or wine to stain the top. Since the top is flamed maple - I thought it would look cool with a finish that would show off all that flame (sometimes called figure or curl). I did scraps with cabernet sauvignon vs. pinot noir and drip coffee vs espresso.

...it was all pretty pretentious, really.

The one constant in all this testing was that - none of the colors was all that vibrant. Not like a really well finished guitar. Here we are eight years later - and I hadn't really given up on the idea.

Keeping that in mind - when I got to the point where I needed to "finish" sand the body I thought - well maybe one last attempt...

"I'll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon."

As I alluded to above - part of the final finishing process is to sand the whole body down using higher and higher (finer and finer) grades of sandpaper. What this does is removes all the surface imperfections in the wood and preps the body for any color or finish. One of the last steps in the sanding process is to raise the wood grain by wetting it. The individual wood fibers will stick up after you wipe the body down with water. Then you sand them off with your highest grit sandpaper. It's a good idea to do this before you put the finish on as it makes the finish smoother. However, there's nothing that says that water can't be coffee. So that's what I did.

As you see in the above photo. It still just "kind of" works. I wiped the whole body down with espresso roast coffee that was super concentrated. Once it had dried it looked just okay. So, I didn't feel all that bad about sanding it down and removing most of that coffee accent (while at the same time getting rid of the raised grain.

I guess we'll have to do this the old fashioned way...

Busted Stuff

"Didn't we just leave this party?"

Some days it feels like I'm just doing the same thing over and over...

Mmmmmm...
Doesn't that look healthy?

In order to fill in the gaps of my poor binding job - I had to over-fill those gaps.  So I started out making another round of binding paste using acetone and tiny pieces of binding.

We're all all fine here...
How are you?

This time around I let the acetone evaporate a little more so that the paste was very thick - almost the consistency of spackling paste.  I then made a first pass on the binding - to fill up the spots that went down to the bare wood.  It looks pretty thick - but was actually significantly less than my first attempt.

Things can only get better from here, right?

After a two or three days of letting the acetone evaporate (and the binding harden) I went back for Round 2!  I basically did the same thing again - put another layer of really thick goop on top of what I already laid down in order to build up the binding enough to be able to scrape it flush with the body.

A sad state of affairs when this can be referred to as "progress."

A mess with a purpose...

I then let this sit for another couple of days (okay maybe it was a week - who's counting?) while this layer of goop hardened.

One step forward - two steps back...

Then it was time for Round 3!
Round three was more of the same, really.  Scrape with the card scraper, sand with the sand paper, and try not to mess it up.  There was one addition this time around and it came from Dan Erlewine of course.  Dan is Stewart MacDonald's spokesperson, main tool developer and guitar repairman extrordinaire.  I have to say - I keep coming back to this guy's advice and it's usually on the money.  He suggests using a razor blade to do fine scraping instead of a card scraper.

Um...
That's not half bad...

Boy, did that make a big difference.  I was having a hard time getting the last bits of binding paste smeared on the wood off - trying to use sand paper.  The card scraper was taking too much off and thinning the binding too much.

The Russian Judge gives it a 7.0

One difference (one of many) between Dan and myself: he uses safety razor blades and I use utility razor blades.  I'm sure that at some point I'll do what he does ('cause he's usually pretty spot-on) but I liked the rigidity of the utility blades for scraping and the results were fairly good.  Safety razor blades just seem to flimsy - but my opinion may change with my level of experience.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so negative...

I'm feeling much better about the binding now.  It's still uneven, sloppy looking, and unfinished but it's 1000 times better than it was - so I'm going to leave it alone for now and move on to finishing the headstock and neck pocket.

That'll do...

 Once I get those two squared away we can finally start digging holes in this sucker!

Pictured: All is not lost.

And the mistakes begin - Part 2

It looks like a wad.
...of gum!  It looks like a wad of gum.

When last we looked at the binding process - things weren't going well.  

In fact they looked like the above picture.  It was kind of a mess and needed some TLC.

No Sir.  I don't like it!

So I scraped (and scraped and scraped) away all that excess binding goo until I was left with...

@#*%^!!!

Well, that's not what I intended to do.  In my zest (okay, let's be honest - it was frustration) to finish up the binding I was a tad too aggressive with the scraping and this fresh bit of nonsense happened.

A nice fat chip of binding came out - right down to the bare wood.

I believe the word you are looking for is, "Craptastic."

It was about this time that I took a breather from fixing the binding and moved on to plugging the tuning peg holes in preparation for laminating the headstock.  When I came back to this it was with the knowledge that I had more to do and little idea of how to go about it.

So, I did what seemed most logical - I kept scraping...

So this is what happens when you scrape with a cheese grater

The binding now looked marginally better but more importantly - it was flush to the body.  As you can see the area around that chip is thin.  Like super thin - near paper thin.  I'm going to try and build up this area (and fix all those chips and dents) slowly - in small passes.  Like I should have done in the first place.
But since it is also pretty flush to the wood - I can't build it up too much.

Another challenging aspect of the needed repairs is that the thinnest sections of the binding are no longer glued to the body.  Right near that chip the binding has come away from the wood.  The really thin section on the other side of the horn has come away as well.  I can probably wick some CA glue in there but I don't know if I want to risk getting any on the wood.  That's the one downside of CA (superglue) - it seals the wood so it won't take a finish or stain.  We'll see...
Getting CA glue in there will be easier - but I think binding goo will look better.

My next step is to mix up another batch of binding paste/goo and try to cover some of these mistakes.

Let's all remember kids - the reason I'm in this mess is because I wanted to take the easy way out.
There's something to be said for doing the hard part first.  In my case it's that I would be fixing a mistake that didn't need to be made.