Following up with the custom router-guide described earlier this week, I channeled out the full perimeters of the guitar faces. As you can see, the interior kerfing strips are really holding the body together at this point. The removed material will be replaced with decorative + structural curved binding borders:
On my 2022 guitar project, I messed up the bindings. The ones I bought, black plastic flexible strips, weren't quite big enough to cover the full ugly exposed parts of the interior. Long story, but an important learning experience. For 2024, I decided to make my own bindings out of wood, to guarantee they are big enough, and to save some money. Once again I used the curling iron to pre-curve very thin strips of wood.
I glued them on, a bit at a time, using up a lot of tape "like water". All the tape and the unusual clamps are attempting to keep these bindings in their intended channels:
Still, there's a lot more yet to do. But at least I've got about 40% done, and once the glue dried I could shave and scrape the excess material:
