September 18, 2020
September 18, 2020
Many years ago I saw Eric Clapton at the Palace of Auburn Hills in Michigan. All through the show, I kept hearing Dire Straits. Finally, I grabbed someone's binoculars, and sure enough, there was Mark Knopfler! Since then I found out they are great buddies, and tour together a lot. Clapton was so cool, he let his tour guitarist have the final encore, this:
I decided that two of my Audiovoxen should have bound necks to go with the bound bodies, because binding is really super classy. So here I'm routing the edges for that. I've taped two strips of scrap binding to the top of the fretboard to act as guides, since it is already radiused and otherwise the router would rock on the curve. The neck is stuck onto a piece of 2x4 for clearance, and the whole arrangement is inside a big box to catch most of the mess. You want to go in one long smooth run rather than nibble at it; you're not taking such a big bite that you can't do it in one pass. Those same pieces of binding are going to get glued on later. Notice that the neck still has a square back. This is actually a pretty easy job and would be even easier if it was done prior to radiusing the fretboard. Set the height of the cut to just remove all the rosewood, so the binding butts against the maple. The depth of the cut is not fussy, as there is still a lot of contouring to do.
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