Guitar restoration - Part 12 - Gluing it all together

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Neck glued and clamped
With everything prepared, it was time to start gluing... the messy, ugly thing with no option to Undo.

First I glued the neck: put some glue on both sides of the neck joint, both on the body and on the neck, pushed the neck in place, put the bolt with the nut in to pull the body and the neck together on the horizontal axis, and clamped the end of the fretboard to the body with some cardboard used to protect the body from clamp marks. Two clamps went on from the sides, and an additional clamp from the soundhole, clamping together the brace+soundboard+fretboard.

After 24 hours I have removed the clamps, and it was time to glue the bridge. Another safety check, another test-fit of the bridge to more precisely mark the bridge location, with the two tester strings has revealed that the bridge should be ~1mm farther away from the soundhole than I have initially marked it (the unfinished area), but that isn't really visible, and probably will cover that 1mm unfinished area with BLO using a very small brush. But that's not really visible, so I'll leave it as is for now. With the exact location found for perfect intonation both fretted and harmonics over the 12th fret I have drawn the outline of the bridge using a pencil, double-checked for it to be centered using two long straight-edges running along the sides of the neck up to the bridge, and then mounted the bridge clamp. I have added glue to both the bridge and the body, leveled it with small pieces of wood, and glued the bridge. It was kindof sloppy (the bridge moved around a lot), and the glue squeeze-out covered the pencil lines, but after a couple of rounds of cleaning, I managed to see the exact location, fixed the bridge there using the clamp (which didn't work perfectly the first time, because it was pushing the bridge away, but after quickly drilling two holes almost all the way down in the block pushing the bridge down to hold the bolts vertically in place it didn't move anymore), triple-checked the location until the bridge was moveable and made sure it's between the pencil marks.
Bridge clamped
Centering the bridge
Bridge location marked with a pencil

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