Kerfing & Binding

Above: the main drag down the R-V lot. Outdoor woodshop area on the left behind the trees. It's rustic but it works.

Man oh man... I'm bushed. Bring on the weekend! Lots of happenings around R-V this week. Some photos: Here are my acoustic sides in their mold. We glued in the kerfing (those strips of slotted wood around the edges) Thursday. Kerfing serves to reinforce the gluing surface between the rosewood acoustic sides and the top and back. Kinda tricky stuff as it's very flimsy when you're gluing it in. It just wants to snap apart. Glued and clamped in:

Kerfing finished:

Today I bound my electric body. Below is the body with binding channel routed into the top edge and tortoise binding strips laying across it.

Next, I ran some low tack tape around the perimeter of the body to get an exact measurement for the length of binding needed. Binding comes in 54" strips and I just made it under that. You don't want to glue in 95% of the binding and get to the end to realize you're an inch short! If the perimeter of your guitar is longer than 54" you just run two strips up the sides, starting from the center seem at the bottom of the body.

Finally, squeeze glue into the channel and tape the bejesus outta that thing to press and hold the binding into place. Everything seems to have worked out. The trickiest part is going around those sharp corners on the cutaway side. Using a heat gun, you can warm up the binding to finesse it into place but too much heat and *poof*! Up in smoke... Binding is highly flammable so watch out.

Below, another angle. You can see the holes drilled from the neck pocket down into the pickup cavities necessary to run the wiring harness. The last bit of tortoise binding sticks out on the right side: