In building there are two kinds of fears: fear of removing too much and fear of sticking stuff together in the wrong place. This fear stops you from doing stupid things, but it at the same time slows you down if you don't know what you are doing. One of my favourite weapons against fear of glue are, as mentioned, dowels. I put three in this build that will be cut out later, to align the three core parts of the instrument. The other weapon you can see in the pictures: lots of glue clamps.
Notice a couple of things in this picture:
- most of the clamps are clamping the pieces of wood together. The idea is to push out as much glue (epoxy in this case) as possible since we do want to use glue but a thick layer of it kills resonance;
- three clamps push pieces of scrap wood down on the carbon rods so those are level with the top of the neck. Later we can knock off the scrap and sand the neck level before gluing on the fretboard;
- plastic from a shopping bag stops the glue from bonding the wood to the work bench;
- the stir stick is taken out of the glue to be able to re-use and the residue glue is left close to the glued assembly to be able to get some idea about the hardening without touching the work itself, at first;
- the gloves (surgical gloves available in the pharmacy, never mind if they look at you with a combination of fear and disgust) are only taken off when leaving and left with the work to harden.
In this pic you can see I dropped some glue that was already gelling onto a part of the join where I wanted some fill. After sanding it turned out that I could have done without, but you never know.
