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Abalone Binding


dawn8

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Hi!

I'm new to this forum and I thought it would be good to introduce myself with a sort of newbie question :D

Well, I'm working on my Les Paul project guitar, it's going to be black with white plastic binding. Plus, what I thought would look good, would be a wide abalone stripe before the binding, like this one: (hope the pics work)

ESPEC1000bodyFrnt.jpgbinding.jpg

Only thing close to this I could find was the abalone purfling on StewMac, but the precut purflings there are way too narrow for me, what I'm looking for is maybe twice that wide.

So, the actual question: :D Does anyone know a place where to buy this kind of abalone binding? Would the cheap extra-thin pearl veneers work that I've seen on some stores? I know they don't require any cavity to install but I don't quite like the idea if the binding sticks out of the body, even a little if you know what I mean.

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Yeah I know they're quite good for binding the fingerboard, but I need also curved pieces. I could just buy a piece of abalone and cut the pieces myself, but it would result in enormous amount of wasted abalone because it is sold in rectangle shaped pieces and i need to cut curved pieces.

The thin pearl veneer thing is quite cheap and my question is whether people here have done well with it...

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1. Using wider abalone purfling will look *way* gaudy. IMO. Even the relatively narrow purfling looks pretty tacky unless very tastefully done.

2. You can use straight sections to go round curves, just break it, and flood with CA afterwards. The breaks don't show up because of the figure of the abalone. This may not be true if you opt for wider purfling, IMO, just another reason to stick with the narrower stuff from StewMac.

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The purfling strips are sold in straight sections. You break them around the curves. If this is your first project you may want to rethink for something simpler. Shell purfling adds a lot of time to a build, and there's more that can go wrong. It's also not cheap. I think a carved top with binding is hard enough for a first project. If you have a couple under your belt, ignore my rambling.

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I think a carved top with binding is hard enough for a first project. If you have a couple under your belt, ignore my rambling.

Well this is kinda my first whole-guitar-completely-from-scratch project, so maybe I'll do the purfling first on the fretboard only. It's all straight lines so it's not as hard to do as the whole body..

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That's a good idea, and it can still look killer. I've seen some people do the purfling, but still leave the fret ends visible. Seems kind of dumb to me to go through all that and have a "unfinished" edge, though. Do you know exactly what you're going to do yet? I'm guessing some kind of laminated WBWB purfling on the body?

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