Binding

1. Trim off excess edge of back plate with flush edge router, then sand edges smooth with an orbital sander or like me (scared of power tools) hand sand with a sanding block.

2. Decide on purfling and binding material. It took me a while to decide because Mike had a plethora of binding materials available so it was hard to choose but I finally came up with a nice light curly maple strip with a thin line of black plastic for purfling to match my rosette design.

3. Mike explained how to measure the width of the combined binding and purfling material and how to come up with the right router bearing to use. My measurement came to .110”m, and then we added .010” for glue which comes to .120”. Because the router bearing # is determined by the diameter and not the radius we doubled the .120 by two, so now we have .240”. This is subtracted from 1.000 which is the cutter size and we get .760” for the router bearing size.

4. I am just binding the top of the uke. I like the continuation of the Ziricote on the sides and back so I’ve decided against binding the back. Mike has rigged up a laminate trimmer to stay perpendicular to the uke. I’ve seen one like it at the Stewart MacDonald site but Mike made this one himself.

5. After it is routed I went over it with a little sanding block to get the rough edges off.

6. Since I have chosen wood for the binding it needs to be bent in the side bender. The side of one-half of the uke is measured and two pieces of curly maple are trimmed to this length. The two pieces are taped together on the ends and then wetted down (not soaked). They are then placed in the side bender and bent just as the sides were done.

7. After binding is taken out of the bender, Mike shows me how he attaches the binding. He starts at the waist and clamps it with a little Quick-Grip clamp (inside of soundhole to side of uke) to hold it flush to the side. He tells me to be sure it is flat in the channel on the side and pushed up against the channel on the top. He adds just a drop of CA to hold it and then keeps going around. He sprays a little accelerator on the glue to speed drying. He uses flush-cut hobby scissors to make the end cut. When one side is done he continues with the other side. At the bottom you want to be careful to match the ends up as perfectly as possible. At the top it doesn’t matter because it will be covered by the neck.

8. After all the purfling and binding is glued, Mike uses an orbital sander to sand the binding smooth to the uke. I am nervous about the orbital so I continue with hand sanding. You may think I’m chicken but one of the other students went through his sides when sanding the binding because of being too aggressive and probably not staying parallel to the sides when sanding. These machines cut really quickly and if you’re not skilled or careful enough you can get into trouble. I feel I need to practice a little more on some practice material with that sander before I attempt to sand on something I really care about.

9. After that I just need to round the edges of my uke (with a hand sander block) and then the soundbox is complete! Ready to start the neck!