We who are about to dye salute you ... or ... a slacker's confession ...

If you got here looking for the Siminoff Lutherie Camp photo essay just click on the 2009 entries link on the left side of this page expand the October entries and you will be jumped to that part of the web log ... or just scroll down and you'll see them ...

It's true ... it's been about 18 months since my last confession ... errrr ... my last work on the F4 mandolin I started way back in October of 2009 at Roger Siminoff's Lutherie Camp ... what can I say ... I've done lots of other things ... I retired for one ... then took a really extensive vacation with some friends through Great Britain and Ireland ... rebuilt several antiques, built a really nice greenhouse for the wife ... OK OK ... it's true ... I was avoiding the hand work of cutting the binding notch around the scroll ... so shoot me ... I just didn't want to face it ...

But I have ... and it was about as miserable as I remembered ... but just like everything else .. if you just suck it up and face the music ... it can be done ...

Here's a shot of the way I strapped the binding on the top during the glue set ..

From Lutherie

I put several pegs in the scroll opening to pin the binding ... I'm, fortunate on the F4 that there is only a single layer of binding which alleviates the nastiness of getting the miters just right ...

From Lutherie

After the glue has dried and a bit of rough sanding ...

From Lutherie

From Lutherie

The back has some really nice figure in the quilted maple ...

From Lutherie

From Lutherie

So ... I sanded ... and sanded ... and sanded some more ... down to 500 grit ... and then I decided that to avoid as much binding scraping as possible ... because I really hate to scrape binding ... I got some automotive striping tape and masked off as much as I could ... I might have been able to do more but decided that it was a trade off of time spent masking or scraping and stopped at the point I thought it was a toss up ...

From Lutherie

From Lutherie

This whole "hole" (oval sound hole that is ... business with a rosette) has been a real issue for me during this build and I hope this masking job will suffice ... worry worry fret fret ...

From Lutherie

So ... next step is to apply the sunburst dye job ... I've done it before so I am more confident than I probably have a right to be ... this will be a traditional for the F4 "red sunburst" ... as my friend Chris has said ... "a sunburst finish can hide a LOT of mistakes" ... I'm counting on it!!!