Today was a good day!
I decided to try a new approach to the initial glue up.
In the previous glue ups, I run into a problem that the purfling is not pre-bended (it’s just too thin to even try) while the binding is pre-bended. This aggravates the nature of thin pieces of wood getting tangled.
Today, I temporarily taped the purfling down so that it acted closer to being pre-bended. This reduced the tangling effect by at least one order of magnitude and maybe more.
Only one issue is that I got the order wrong in glue up but was already half way through when I figured this out. Fortunately, I can ensure that the other half of the top is the same so it really won’t be a problem and I will probably be the only one who cares or notices. I wanted the pattern for the purfling to be dark wood, blood wood, ebony, then the binding but instead wound up being ebony, blood wood, dark wood and then the binding.
At the bottom of the picture, you can just make out the colors of each piece of purfling. The dark wood is close in color to the ebony so again, it’s probably only me that will notice or care.
I also felt that the tightness of the glue up was great so later this afternoon, when I remove the rubber and tape, I’ll find out.
Nice job. I did a Woodcraft class where we built a kit guitar. For some reason the instructor had us do 7 pieces of purling–the glueup was a nightmare–he basically had to do it for every student. I was scraping glue for days off the damn thing. Really put me off doing another guitar, but of course I will eventually relent!
I did the same class but ours was a 3 piece of purfling but it was pre-glued so it wasn’t too hard. Remember too that only the binding is necessary from a sound board point of view (also protects the end grain of the top and back boards) so for the first guitar, it might be a good idea to leave out purfling all together.