Day 14 - Clean clothes, a full belly, 7 bottles of wine, and a bear

Day 14: It’s Sunday, and I got up early and worked for a couple of hours scraping and sanding my guitar body. Still a lot of sanding that can/should be done, but overall it’s looking pretty good.

Before lunch, my dad, Brendon (one of the other students), and I made a trip to Hanover to got to the Co-op market. I stocked up on wine you can’t get at the state-run stores in Pennsylvania and picked up a few other supplies for the last week of class. After that we went to Fairlee to do laundry and have pizza for lunch, and then I was back in the workshop by 1pm. Much of the afternoon was spent troubleshooting the little “problem spots” that had arisen as a function of my problems with the router the other day. I had a couple of little separations between the body and the binding that were touched up with a shellac stick, which looks like a crayon that you melt and smear into any little spots that need filling; I used a dark brown to match the rosewood. I also worked on a solution to a separation that was too big to fill with the shellac stick. I won’t point that out to you, since if I correctly execute the fix it will look like I did it on purpose! 

Here are some shots of the purfling and "superbindings."

Finally, I worked up the courage to do the routing for my headstock inlay. After doing a bunch of test runs on a scrap piece of ebony, I dove in and took the Dremel tool to my headstock. Let me tell you, compared to routing into your headstock, a dissertation defense is a cake walk. It came out fine; I’ll glue it in and fill in the gaps tomorrow or the next day. Here's a shot of the rough fit:

Worked from 7-9am, 1-7pm and 8:15-9:45pm, had some pizza, and have fresh clothes for the homestretch.

Matt showing off his work

Brendon cutting inlay