Lyn #14 - Solid-body Acoustic

[robin]

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.

[robin]

Once the beading/gouging was done it was out with the chisel.



Here is the end result. It is still pretty rough, and I made a few noob mistakes with the chisel, but after I file and sand it back I am hoping that it will be OK. I’m not after perfection here. It took a bit longer than using a router (well actually, a lot, LOT longer) but it sat nicely with my ethos of hand tools only, and it was a great way to learn how to use a chisel.



My next job will to be to actually glue the binding. That job, I am told, is not as easy as it sounds.

Stay tuned.

[dingobass]

Hot Dayum!

[pablopepper]

That binding marking jig is brilliant.

[wokkaboy]

awesome work as always Westie07, binding channel by hand you have done a great job. So if the channel is about 4mm wide, will you have 2 layers of binding, maybe different colours ? that's a wide channel.
I think cutting the channel is much harder than gluing the binding. Helps to have a heat gun (you may need a power tool finally !) to pre-bend the binding, especially on the lower horn is the tightest contour of the tele body

[FrankenWashie]

Now that is some quality MacGyvering. Great job!

[RedneckRampage]

One day I too shall have the guts to try something insanely awesome like this with wood!
Looking mighty fine dude! Awesome work!

[wokkaboy]

hey Redneck, doesn't take guts to build a scratchy. Just get some cheap timber (here a pine body blank costs about $25), get some plans or design your own shape and start cutting. Can get a PBG neck for it.
If you muck up the first attempt at least you can replace the body blank pretty cheaply.
Once you have built a couple of these you will have the experience and confidence to move onto some nicer timbers

[robin]

@DB
Thanks Phil, I think…. Although it could be a “Hot Dayum” what does this idiot think he’s doing? Lol.

@Pabs
Thanks Craig, but I can’t take any credit for the beading jig. I just adapted someone else’s idea to work with a guitar.

@Woks
Thanks Warren, it’s not so pretty IRL, but I am hoping that the binding will hide all my mistakes. It will actually be 3 layers of binding, cream/black/cream. I probably should have used some purfling but I didn’t fancy doing a second channel for that.

@Frankie
Thanks mate, I wish I could take some credit, but I stole it from the interwebs.

@Redneck
Thanks mate. Woks is right, as usual.

I am using a Pitbull neck, an assortment of hardware and some cheap-as bits of pine. If it all goes belly up, and I have every expectation that it will, I will just bin the body and reuse the neck and hardware on some other wacky experiment.

Until I started making these Pitbull guitars I had zero experience in working with wood. But building the kits I picked up a few skills and now I think, what the heck, that sounds like a good idea, I might give it a go.

The hand tools bit is just me having too much spare time on my hands.

Cheers guys,
Rob

[wokkaboy]

good stuff Westie, triple binding C/B/C will look the goods mate.
you are too negative about your abilities buddy, no way this project will go belly up

keep up the good work mate !