Herringbone purfling repair
Posted: Mon May 29, 2023 8:39 pm
I guess it's not a good sign when you have to do a repair before the guitar is even finished, but it's good to know it may not be the end of the world. I had glued the maple top bindings on an OM, one at a time to get it done right. I used a clamp to make sure the bend at the waist was tight. But because of the clamp and waxed paper, I could not see that I had not pulled the binding down tight enough, so when I unclamped it there was a forever ugly gap.
I thought I would rout out both the herringbone purfling and the binding, but decided to try just routing the binding. I set up the router for depth; because I had cut new taller bindings, I had to switch to a Lee Valley bit which would cut a tall enough rabbet for the new binding. I started my cut at the mid-point of the upper right bout, and my router went rogue somehow. The body was sliding up in the base. This allowed the bit to come up so the bearing went into the channel I had started to cut, and chew up part of the herringbone purfling. I have a second Colt router so I put it in my binding cutter rig, reset it, and it worked perfectly. I still don't know what went wrong with the first one. But I had to repair the damge. In the photo I have started to cut away the outer half of the purfling, back to clean material.
I made a patch from a purfling cutting:
After bending it to fit, I glued it in:
After cleaning things up a bit I glued the new bindings in today:
It's not perfect but pretty darn good, and I'll do some more tweaking as I move - um - forward, for a change! Bruce W.