Loose Bindings

  • Thread starter Thread starter Frank Story
  • Start date Start date
Clive Hugh said:
A good repairman.


Good answer.

Really, bring it to a pro. Just regluing it will probably fail very quickly (at least with body binding), as you are not fixing the core problem. The thing is, that old cellulose binding shrinks with time (be glad, it rarely suffers from spontainious combustion in the sizes we use for binding; large sheets of it which get used for pickguards can do that sometimes). It takes a lot of clamping to get it back in there, and even then it is usually a one to ten year job. But the cauls involved in doing it right are very high skill woodworking, and you don't want to mess with that.

The perminant fix, which does not look very good, is to cut the binding and piece in a new section of binding, which will never match perfectly.

And of course, if it is the fingerboard binding on a Gibson, well now you know a little bit of why people give Gibson a hard time about their workmanship. That is usually a simple glue failure, and while I would still encourage you to take it to a repair shop, you can get by with some Duco Plastic Cement, and use strips of masking tape to clamp it in place. But be VERY careful not to let any of that Duco get on the finish, as it will eat right through, and then you have a whole other issue which will cost about 10 times as much to fix as bringing it to a good repair shop in the first place.


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"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
Oh, hey, you said fingerboard binding.


Ooops.


Still, I highly recomend you take it to a pro, unless you want to stick to your neck whenever you play.


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"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
The hard part about regluing any binding is that you have to get ALL the old glue off in order for the new glue to take properly, this is nearly impossible without removing the entire binding, or at least the entier loose section. Removing the parts of binding which are still adhered well is harder than you might think and often chips the finish so like allready said a pro is your best bet.
 
Dani Pace said:
The hard part about regluing any binding is that you have to get ALL the old glue off in order for the new glue to take properly, this is nearly impossible without removing the entire binding, or at least the entier loose section. Removing the parts of binding which are still adhered well is harder than you might think and often chips the finish so like allready said a pro is your best bet.



Well, with any wood glue that is certainly true, but plastic cement does a good job of redisolving old plastic cement, as one of it's main ingredients is acetone (or some similar solvent).

But of course, that is why it causes such problems with the finish. The same solvent which desolves old glue also disolves finish. And of course you DO want to get as much old glue off as possible, but you want to avoid removing anything which is already solid as well. This is exactly why god gave guitars repair people dental picks.


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"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
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