Thanks Frank, Stan, Kim and Andrew
I thought it was about time to try my hand at binding, so as this guitar is very much a test bed, I thought why not?
First hurdle? How am I going to cut a channel for the binding without a router? Answer, same as with everything else, with a chisel.
I needed to cut a guiding gouge so as to reduce tear out. I would dearly love to be able to afford to buy a descent gramil but even with one of those, with its flat surface, I was going to have a problem with the horn and the waist-line of a guitar. I found the answer on Google and made myself a “poor man’s” beading tool. I had to modify it by rounding of the surface to fit the contours of a guitar but it worked pretty well.
The screw that does the gouging is sharpened by simply lightly filing the top surface flat until there is a slight cutting edge around the circumference of the screw. Apart from its simplicity the beauty is it is quite accurate and by turning the screw 1/2 turn I could go from 5mm to 4mm in seconds.
And here it is from a different angle showing how I had to round off the edges for the horn and waist.
Here it is in action.
The bevel was actually to match the rather extreme horn curve but it worked fine for the waist-line as well.
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