Bending Wood Bindings

[Gordon Bellerose]

One of the more challenging things I do is bending wood for bindings on an electric guitar.
Working with figured woods is tough, especially when they are so thin and brittle.
Below is a link to some thing I found on YouTube.

I am wondering if anyone has tried this, or something similar?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTbc6FDusUQ

[Brian Evans]

When I was getting a tour of Benedetto's workshop in Savannah last week, they told me two things about wood bindings. One, it's at least a $1,000 up-charge on any guitar, and second, soak the bindings in water for at least two weeks. I mean, two weeks! That is a long time, and something I will try... I guess there was a third thing, you can use a soldering iron to help bend them for tight bends like F-holes.

[Dan Smith]

I tried that with Mesquite, did not work. It fell apart and stained it.
I soaked it in hot water, no go.
I tried super-soft, failure.

What worked for me was to lay a wet rag across my bending iron, mist the Mesquite with water, and use a strip of tin against the outside of the binding. It seems getting the binding too wet made it mushy.

I did make several two piece molds to clamp the binding while it cooled down.

[Freeman Keller]

I have successfully bent wood binding for a couple of guitars with Venetian cutaways - both rosewood and flamed maple. I first bend the big curves (lower bout, waist, upper bout without the cut) on my Fox bender, then I do the cut on a hot pipe. I make a mold for the cutaway and just work the binding into it. Sometimes I get a tiny bit of splintering but after its bent I'll put some waxed paper in the mold, wick a little thin CA into the splits and force it back into the mold.

I should make an inner and outer mold like he does in the vid, notice the clever use of a socket for the radius of the inside of the horn







I bend all the little curved pieces for headstock, pick guard, f-holes in the same way - hot pipe, wet rag, and a little mold of some sort. I haven't tired super soft or any thing other than water but I'll definitely try the ammonia and aluminum foil trick the next time.

[Gordon Bellerose]

I am getting lined up to try the ammonia trick this week.
I bought a small piece of ABS pipe and two end caps.
I cut one side of the pipe off and glued the caps on, making a long shallow trough.
I will use this to soak the bindings. I can use the off cut of the pipe as a cap to stop the fumes from spreading.

I am going to use the body off cuts, and my plywood template as a bending form.
I re-sawed the body off cuts to 3/4 inch thick.
I have a heat gun that I will use to heat the bindings once they are wrapped in tinfoil.

We'll see how this goes, and I will let you all know.

[Bruce McIntosh]

I got herringbone to bend by soaking it in a shallow sinkful of warm water for about 15 min. I taped wax paper to the guitar body to protect it from getting wet, and clamped and taped
the binding in place 'til it dried. The soak-it-in-water method evidently is highly dependent on the species of wood involved (witness the above testimony regarding mesquite ).

[John LaCroix]

For really tight areas of a bend, like the outside of a horn on a cut-a-way, is to glue a piece of veneer or thin 2-ply birch plywood to the outside with superglue to help support it during the bend. After the binding is installed I just file/scrape it off.

[Steve Sawyer]

For really tight areas of a bend, like the outside of a horn on a cut-a-way, is to glue a piece of veneer or thin 2-ply birch plywood to the outside with superglue to help support it during the bend.

Something that I learned in a wood-forming class recently. When bending wood, the fibers on the inside of the bend compress. Any stretching of the fibers on the outside of the bend will be a failure.

Thus a trick like this with the veneer that prevents stretching on the outside and forces compression on the inside should have some success.

[Christ Kacoyannakis]

I tried soaking some curly maple in a long PVC tube of ammonia, and it worked, although it did slightly change the color of the wood. It was still a bit hard to bend around a tight horn of a cutaway, so what I did was hold the body and the binding against my bending iron, and slowly rolled it around the horn. After it was bent, I taped it in place until it dried.

If you also make acoustics, and make a bending form for your sides, you can put your bindings on the same form. Or you could make a simple MDF form for the outline of your body and use a heat blanket to bend them with a negative mold to support the wood.

I am a bit surprised at the amount of the upcharge for wood bindings, but honestly, it really is a huge pain. It looks much nicer, and I would like to use all wood and no plastic in my guitars, but I recently bound to identical bodies, one in plastic, and one in curly maple, and the plastic was SO much easier.

[Gordon Bellerose]

It's been quite some time since I started this thread, and I still have not gotten around to trying the ammonia thing.
Repairs have kept me too busy, but I have a week off my regular job coming up, so that is when I plan to try.

[Michael McBroom]

I build classicals plus one steel string acoustic I built for myself that has a Venetian cutaway. Because of my builds, I have used only wood binding on my guitars. I've built guitars from a variety of back/side woods, however, and I find that the species of wood makes a big difference as to any sort of difficulty I encounter. I've found that Indian rosewood, walnut, and bloodwood bend easily, whereas padauk is frustratingly difficult. The steel string with cutaway has claro walnut back/sides and I used offcuts from the sides to make the binding strips. The claro walnut bent easily for the cutaway using a hot pipe and just spritzing it with water as I was bending it. To get padauk to bend at all, I had to soak it and keep it very wet as I was bending it, and I still often had to use cyano glue to repair splinters after bending it. I like the looks of padauk, but I really don't like working with it. Of all the woods I've used, I've found bloodwood to be the easiest to work with.

I use a heating blanket with a temperature controller and a form for bending sides and binding, although I used a pipe for the cutaway on the steel string I built. I have seen examples of the same setup as mine but using forms with extremely tight bends in which wood binding has been bent successfully. Tight bends like a Les Paul cutaway, for example. I've had no occasion to bend binding with such tight radii, so I've never tried building forms for this sort of purpose, but at least I know I can do it if I need to with my rig.