Day 13 - Back in the saddle with the router

Day 13: Today we unwrapped our guitar bodies, which had been bound for the night to glue in the binding on the back. We then set out to route the top for the binding and purfling channels. I had routed for the binding yesterday, and was still undecided about doing purfling on the top after my mishaps with the router yesterday. But I decided that purfling would really compliment the “superbinding” and that I needed to get back on the horse with the router. No hicups this time; purfling glued in successfully. We then glued in the binding for the top; this procedure is exactly like doing the back, which we did last night.

Here's a picture of my back bindings. Since they match the rosewood back and sides, you can hardly tell they're there. But the purfling line is really cool looking (and you can see the endstrip in the distance; the dark spots on the sides are glue areas that still need to be scraped). Once the top binding and purfling is cleaned up tomorrow, I'll try to grab a picture of that.

While my bindings were setting, I began shaping the bridge. This is something I thought would be incredibly difficult, but surprisingly it went much easier than I anticipated. After a couple of hours, I had much of it in shape. You’ll note that I’m doing a traditional “pyramid” style bridge.

Now that the bindings are in place, we can start cleaning up all the exceed glue etc. around the sides, top, and back. Looks like I’ll be spending a bunch of time with the little metal scraper (the most useful tool ever). I started working on this today, and will continue tomorrow and whenever there’s free time. 

Saturday is a full work day here, although by comparison to some other days, it was relatively short. Started at 8am, finished at 6pm, with 20 minutes for lunch; then went back to work on my dad’s inlay for another hour or so after dinner (he liked my bear so much that he commissioned another pacific northwest icon for his headstock).

[EDIT: Day 14...Although the pearl salmon I cut for my dad turned out great, it just didn't look right on the headstock of a classical guitar, so we decided not to install it]

By the way, there are only 5.5 work days left (assuming that we work a half-day tomorrow, which seems about right, given that I need to go to the laundromat and get some groceries). Not sure how everything will get done in that short amount of time...