Binding the Guitar

John Griswold
Woodworkers of the World Unite!!!
6 min readFeb 22, 2022

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One side glued, now for the other

Now that the guitar box is glued up and the sides are sanded “level” the ticklish moves begin. The thin edges of the spruce top plate and hardwood back are fairly fragile; a careless bump against a guitar stand or table leg can chip a chunk right out, an occasion for hot curses and salty tears. The cure for the vulnerable edges is to bind them with strips of plastic, or in the case of my build, curly maple.

The grain on wooden binding runs lengthwise, exposing the strongest grain to a cruel and hard-edged world, and the trick is to cut channels in the all too fragile guitar body corners to receive that binding. Most luthiers use small routers and various jigs to rout the channels, a nerve-wracking affair given that the high-speed cutting bit can do a whole lot of damage in a very short time. There are ways to execute this step with hand tools however, and so of course I’m going to try them.

Violin makers use a “gramil” tool, basically a post to register on the edge of the violin that holds double cutters to score the outlines of the channel that will accept the “purfling”. Luthier’s Mercantile Inc. sells a gramil tool for guitars, and though I thought about making one I took the easy route and bought two from LMI. Why two you might ask. LMI sponsors a YouTube channel where Robert Obrien of Obrien Guitars demonstrates many of their products. Naturally I watched his video on using the gramil and immediately noticed that he used two. He set one to the thickness of the binding, the cut I am making in the picture above, and the other to the width, a move I’ll elaborate on further down.

I had already bought one when I watched his video and had used it to cut the channels in the back, the second one arrived as I turned to bind the top. I also bought a couple of depth rings that fit the silver shaft holding the cutters and lock in place, preserving the cutter setting and increasing speed and accuracy.

The gramil has a flat register face and a curved one; the flat face accurately follows the convex curves around the upper and lower bouts of the guitar, the round face maintains a single point of contact through the concave curves of the waist, maintaining…

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John Griswold
Woodworkers of the World Unite!!!

Master carpenter, watercolor artist and beat up old jock…owned by Black Lab Bo who considers two tennis balls a minimum mouthful