Repairing shrunken and separating guitar binding

This is the second part of repairing shrunken guitar body binding — specifically working around the front of the guitar and navigating the tricky area where the binding disappears under the neck heel. There's also a small but useful tip about tape that I somehow forgot to mention last week . Shrunken bindings often cause gaps at the internal curve of the guitar waist. Last week we looked at the annoying process of working shrunken binding free from a guitar body to provide a little extra slack at the waist. We pulled this slack back and glued the binding back in place, leaving a little gap at the start/end point which we filled with a new piece of binding grafted in. So, with the back taken care of, it’s time to move around the front of the guitar. The procedure is pretty much the same for carefully separating the binding from the body—score along the joint to give the lacquer a handy ’break-line’ and then gently work the binding loose with a craft knife blade. So far, so similar.…