Sanding a guitar body

After a bit of time re-establishing the routine with getting kids to school and doing homework with the kids, I got back in the shop. I had left off finishing the install of the binding and purfling on guitar 3′s body. I had done a little clean up and wanted to finish that up.

I use way too much glue. I must be addicted to it because I can’t help myself applying as much as I do even though I know that the squeeze out will be wasteful and messy. The mess makes it really hard to clean up. Sanding it uses a lot of sand paper because the glue dries hard. Scraping is hard on the scrapers and some times, I get extra tear out when a glue bit sticks too hard to the wood. I really need to work on this but for this guitar body, it was too late.

Clean up is a mixture of sanding and scraping. I’m still new to scraping so I tend to over use the sand paper. With bending and purfling, it’s important to keep the sides square and not round over the binding (still perfecting my own technique on this but each guitar gets better). The goal is to have an even thickness of binding around the guitar body and have no round over though we will ease the edges before it’s time to finish (cause, trust me you do not want to play a guitar that the body doesn’t have it’s edges eased – they are sharp).

After the clean up, I do a quick sanding going from 80 grit all the way to 220 grit. I will probably touch up the body again with 220 before I apply the finish.

Above you can see the current state of the guitar bodies. Back left is guitar body 2 which has binding and purfling installed. Back right is guitar body 3 which also has the binding and purfling installed. In front is guitar body 4 which I will begin the binding and purfling installation next time.

This is guitar body 2 with it’s binding and purfling.

This is guitar body 3 with it’s binding and purfling.

Next step will be to pre-bend the binding for guitar body 4 and then on to glue up, clean up and sanding. After that, it’ll be time for the necks.