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I'm needing a strategy to cover something I should have done at an earlier stage but didn't.

I'm binding a spruce/palo escrito classical build. Bindings are off-cuts from the sides - there are no extras, so I can't back up to that step. The purfling scheme is three lines between bindings and sides, as well as three lines between bindings and back and four between bindings and top. I should have laminated the narrow purflings to the narrow edge of the bindings before bending the bindings, but I did not. So now I have a real plate of spaghetti to juggle.

I guess the way to proceed is just to wrestle everything into place, tape well, and tack it in place with CA and then proceed as usual with a CA-style binding job. If you see any obvious faults with this, please let me know.

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

Are the side purfs bent ??? If not, tape them to some sacrificial bindings and bend so that every thing is bent prior to doing the CA glue in.

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Tony Karol
www.karol-guitars.com
"let my passion .. fulfill yours"

Jim if you want to use wood glue you can always do it in stages. Use pins to hold in the purfling lines as you go, or you can use teflon strips the same size as your bindings to work in stages. Do the side purflingd first, then the top purfling, then the binding. Makes it easier just takes longer.

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Thanks guys. I think I'll do both - Tony's idea for bending the purflings, then glue them in separately so I don't have to struggle so much with the miters where they meet the back and tail strips.

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

Jim, you're in for a fair amount of pain whichever way you jump. Here are a couple more ideas:

1) Proceed as per Rod's instructions above (better to take it slow with wood glue than have CA gluing everything together). As well as pins, you could temporarily tack some small blocks into the rebate so that the purfling tucks under them as you go. Easier than struggling with pins everywhere. If you need to pre-bend the purfling on edge, clamp a couple of pipe clamps (jubilee clips) to your bending iron to form a groove to support the purfling-on-edge.

2) More radical and depends on how good your rebating process is. Make some new bindings and proceed as normal. When finished, rebate the new bindings off and replace with the "proper" ones. I've done this sort of thing numerous times on my test guitars when I replace tops to try new ideas. I replace the top then just rebate down to the top of the side purfling and stick new bindings on. You will have the top purfling to cut to as well, but you're running off the same reference as before (i.e. the side) so you should not really have a problem.

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Trevor Gore, Luthier. Australian hand made acoustic guitars, classical guitars; custom guitar design and build; guitar design instruction.

http://www.goreguitars.com.au

Thanks. I have a Fox style bender, so taping the laminated purflings to a sacrificial binding strip and bending that seems easiest. I have to bend some lam strips for linings anyway, so no extra work there.



Clamping them in with a removable strip strip seems easiest. I don't have teflon the right size, but I guess I could rip some strips from a bigger piece. Or, does wood glue hold regular white plastic bindings very well? Could I just rip them off after the glue dries?
(I've only ever used Weld-on and similar glues with those, and I don't know the answer.)

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

The conventional wisdom is "no" but I've never actually tried it, nor do I know anyone else who's tried it, which is something of an answer, I guess!



They may well just fall off when you remove the tape! It should take you no more than ~20mins to try it out on some scrap. Let us know how you go.

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Trevor Gore, Luthier. Australian hand made acoustic guitars, classical guitars; custom guitar design and build; guitar design instruction.

http://www.goreguitars.com.au