Body Binding. That sounds like some sort of Victorian-era torture for women. In reality, it is nothing more than the little protective strip around the edge of the guitar’s body, protecting that sharp edge from chips and nicks like a car bumper. You can get pretty fancy with this stuff by using different materials (plastic, wood, etc.) or adding multiple layers to get a striped effect. You can also add an additional band inside the binding, known as purfling. Binding and purfling on an electric guitar are essentially for visual enhancement. On a Les Paul-style guitar, it covers up the seam between the mahogany body and the maple top. On an acoustic or hollow-body guitar and in other stringed instruments such as violins it serves a more structural role, by blocking the uptake of moisture through the end grain of the top or back plates. This helps to keep the thin top and back panels from cracking.
Most guitars have some sort of angle to the top in relation to to the back of the guitar. This means that you need to make some sort of contraption that allows the router to follow the height of the top as you trace around the outside edge of the guitar’s body when cutting the binding channel. On a Les Paul, most of the top is exactly parallel to the back. This means that you can rout out the channel using a fixed height on the router. The only place where this isn’t true is in the cutout where the top rises up to meet the bottom edge of the fretboard. You have two options here. First, you can try to follow that contour using some contraption that allows the router to float up and down. Doing this often means that a small “eyebrow” of the maple will remain between the bottom of the binding and the mahogany body. The other option is to keep the bottom of the binding at the same height as it goes through the cutout area and then fill in the entire area with binding. This usually means making two passes with the router, the first up high to get the upper part of the cutout, then a second pass at the regular binding location. I chose the latter.
I have to give credit to StewMac for selling a fantastic router bit for cutting the binding channels. It is sharp and cuts extremely cleanly. Here you can see how the guide bearing rides on the body of the guitar while the blades makes the cut. You can buy different guide bearings in order to cut different depths of binding channels.
The next challenge is get the binding to follow the curves of the body. For the most part, the body contours are gradual enough that the binding is easily bent to the correct radius. Getting around the horn of the cutout can be a challenge, though. Especially if you are using a thicker binding material like I did. After trying to soften the binding with hot water, I ended up using a heat gun to soften up the binding. This worked very well. Once the binding cools down it retains its shape.
Once again, I used Weld-16 glue for attaching the binding, holding it in place with masking tape.
A bit of scraping with a razor blade to get the binding flush with both the top and the sides of the guitar got the binding close to final. I did have to fill in a small section at the tip of the horn with some binding shavings dissolved in acetone. Otherwise, it was a successful exercise.
