So today was glue the maple top to the freshly planed and contoured body day...I'd set the neck and let it be overnight, so the first thing I had to do was cut out the shape and the pocket for the neck.I figured out where my center line was through the center of the neck so I could properly align the seam on the maple cap and drew an outline of the body with a pencil and cut that out. Then, using the center line as a guide, I calculated the cut-out needed to fit around the bottom of the neck. I cut it a shade small and the sanded by hand to get the fit I wanted:

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Note to self...when cutting the body shape out of the $120.00 piece of maple, take your time and give yourself plenty to work with.

I test-fitted it about 100 times and took my time sanding, which was good because it turned out that I didn't give myself much margin for error (in other words, hardly more than none) as I should have when I cut out the cap and I ended up just BARELY covering the whole body. Dumb, rookie mistake, but I got lucky and was able to make slight adjustments to the cut out for the neck to make it work...by a hair or two.

So, to do the forearm contour bend, I tried the kerf-cut trick I found on YouTube. My cuts aren't as nice as the ones that guy did (I'm a router newbie)...

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...but it did work (and no one will ever see my squiggle-cuts anyway...next time I'll use a guide) This is actually a pretty slick way to do it, barely even requiring router skills...mucho pleased.

And then the moment of truth...glue time:

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Now...I'm sure everyone knows this, but when you do this, there's no such thing as too many clamps. I had ten clamps and a half-dozen 2-inch spring clams (pretty worthless, but I left them on for comic effect), and I wish I'd had about four more clamps. Everything looks pretty tight, but I'm expecting a gap or two because after planing and sanding the body, I don't think it ended up 100% flat (as close as I could get...I mean...I checked with a straight edge and it looked good to me):

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Yup...that's a pretty redneck clamp-up job (note the OSB), but I think it just might work...or explode in a cloud of maple splinters when I relieve the pressure. Either way will be pretty exciting when I take off the clamps tomorrow