Gluing up the rims

Starting to look like an instrument!

Back inlay strip

Preparing the back for bracing, Indian Rosewood back strip to match the binding. Vacuum bag was great for glueing it in and getting full pressure.

Scoop Cutaway kerfing

This guitar will have a "scoop" cutaway. More on what that is later, but on the cutaway area, I need full coverage on the sides to attach the cutaway veneer. So I made some custom kerfing from basswood that is the full height of the guitar sides. Then when I sand away the circular cutaway, there will be good surface area anywhere for gluing the veneer.

The rosette...

This rosette is walnut burl surrounded by two strips of Paua Abalone "zip flex". To make the burl part, I used burl veneer and vacuum bag clamped it to a regular piece of walnut (to insure color match if I should sand through). Then the ring was cut out with a dremel in a circle cutting router base.

Then I used the same dremel setup to route the channel in the soundboard. Once that was finished, I carpet taped the rosetted to a piece of plywood, and ran it through the drum sander until is just a little thinner than the channel. This let it sit just below the surface of the soundboard. Then the entire soundboard was sent through the drum sand to make it flush.

The abalone was done similar, but it was left proud and sanded down to the soundboard.

"Doming" the fret ends, a better way...

I always file a dome on the ends of my frets before installation. Gives them a nice look and also lets you fingers slide over them easy.

This time I came up with a better way to do it, rather than hand filing that tiny end.

I chucked a grinding wheel in my dremel, installed it in the router base, and clamped it upside down. This let's me hold the fret and grind it on the wheel while it's spinning. This was much faster than doing it by hand with the file. You can also slow down the dremel for better control.

Fretboard sidemarkers

I found a cool way to hold the fretboard on it's side while installing the side markers... just put it in the truss rod slot on the neck!

Headstock Binding

It took a while to get the headstock binding right. Last years binding was mitered at the tight curves, which I wasn't really happy with. And previous attempts (on guitars 2, 3, and 4) to bend wood around
the tight radius of my headstock profile were very difficult, I broke a lot of wood before one worked.

So this time I've redesigned the headstock to have more gradual curves so I can go back to a single piece of wood binding bent around the entire headstock. The trick was to thin the binding from .090" to .060" (yes, 1/3), which makes it able to take a tighter bend without the outside fibers breaking from too much stretching.

This approach worked well, and below is the bound headstock. It came out perfect, for the first time ever.

Not much contrast, it is Indian Rosewood against the same for the headstock overlay. I usually like more contrast in the binding, but it needs to match the binding on the rest of the guitar  and that will look good against the Curly Koa of the tone woods.