Lutherie Vids

[martin manning]

Anybody who has ever bought anything from Stew-Mac probably knows about these, but they are good stuff, and better than watching regular woodworking TV shows. Of course they really want to sell you a tool for everything (and they have a tool for everything), but they are fun. Miles, that latest one on scraping the binding on a 'burst finish is for you, man!

http://www.stewmac.com/tsarchive.html

[Reeltarded]

He takes too many passes at it! I cut my blades with both edges on one tip and do it in one swipe like they used to do it. There can be ugly consequences for scraping the width in stages. The fresh edge can pop beyond the wood if the finish is 10 minutes too old.

It is beautiful to see that contrast revealed for the first time, every time.

[telentubes]

I went to the Gibson factory in Montana about 15 years ago and went on the acoustic guitar factory tour. The binding scraper (a young woman with pictures of her kids at her work station) was especially interesting to me as I am fascinated by people who have done some task so many times it becomes gestural. She was a one pass scraper, flipping through sunburst acoustics every few minutes (the guy doing the sunburst was about 20 feet away). You can learn a lot from folks who have refined a task down to just the essentials. Fun to watch when made to look so easy. I have scraped a lot of binding, and I agree with Miles. Too many passes. It makes it look hacked up, which it is.

[telentubes]

Forgot to thank Martin for the link. Looks like lots of good info.

[martin manning]

Is the binding left a little proud of the wood when the finish is applied? And, I assume a clear coat is put on after the color is scraped off of the binding (and the binding is scraped down to its final form in the process)?

Pretty cool trick in the second video where a cutting board (i.e. a big thick piece of LDPE bought for cheap) is used to make a form to pre-bend the binding strips.

[Reeltarded]

No, it's flush. Run your nail across the joint and you will feel the film thickness of the final clear coats drop off the edge of lock coat over the color.

Bindings. Nitro or nothing. These modern materials are all going to come off in our lifetime. Ask CF Martin III.

A heat gun and a pair of pliers is how I curve bindings. You overbend everything so it won't have sprung tension away from the joints. A D style acoustic doesn't need any bending, you heat it up as you go on long curves. An F model mandolin is some whole other story, multiple layers on fine archtops like Epiphone Emperors is also an advanced kind of thing.

I really need a video of me opening up a 20s/30s F5 to regraduate/rebrace. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You will turn your speakers down or wish you had. It sounds like... hmmm.. an F16 in full afterburner. Once I had a guy who wouldn't leave the shop. I got the neck out of his mandolin and told him to go get something to eat.. and that is when he asked me how do you regraduate the top without messing up the finish. haha

Band saw, of course. Go eat.

[Structo]

I tried that a couple times and found out I am not a scraper.....

I use pin striping tape to mask the binding, tedious but better results for me.

[Reeltarded]

Impossible.

You may have applied too much of a lock coat. Scraping really is the only way. Takes 15 minutes for a fully bound guitar too.