Over the last 2 weeks, I glued up the binding and purfling on the edges of the guitar. I broke them up into 4 quadrants (top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right). Usually, as I progress the quality of my work gets better but to be perfectly honest, I think I did the best job on the back side which is where I started. I'm working on clean up now which involves scraping and sanding (I imagine if I had the right plane, that I might even use planes but I haven't found one that works great on this kind of clean up).
Below is the guitar with the binding and purfling glued up. You can see the glue left overs (I always use too much glue and I really have to work on that). The back top corner (where the cutout joins the location where the neck will be attached) has a nicely mitered corner while the top still needs to be improved. I'm not sure how I'll do this and I may wait till I finish the neck joint and fix it just before I bolt the neck permanently in place and before I finish (probably going with french polish).
The next two pictures show the binding after I've cleaned it up.
The first one below, you can see the nice contrast of the purfling that I chose. The inner is a dark (mahogany color?) wood. The middle is blood wood which gives a super read and will match the headstock. The outer just before the maple binding is ebony (though I think it's just ebony stained).
The second one below, you see the maple binding with the dark (again mahogany color?) wood edge on the lower side.
You can just catch the bottom end where the blood wood edge is placed.
The next step is probably working on the neck joint for the 3 guitars. It will be a bolt on tongue and groove joint which should give great surface contact with the body ensuring solid acoustic characteristics between the neck and body.
