I took a long lunch today and drove up to Eisenbrand Exotics to buy some curly Koa for binding material. My mind wandered on the drive back to the office, and thought I'd open up a couple topics for discussion.
First: Eisenbrand is very cool. All the candy you can eat. I spent half an hour or so looking through their bins of snakewood -- it took every ounce of self-restraint to keep from buying all of it. I am proud to say that I walked out with nothing more than the curly Koa I went there to buy, but I had a lot of fun. (This isn't really a discussion point; it was just a neat trip.)
Second: On making your own. Do you make your own binding, or buy it from our wonderful sponsors? And why? What about kerfed lining? I find making binding and kerfed lining the less entertaining part of lutherie, but I can't bring myself to buy this stuff pre-made, either from a financial or a philosophical perspective. I whipped up a batch of reverse-notched kerfed lining a couple weeks ago --- enough to make six guitars, and my investment was $3 worth of honduras mahogany and three-and-one-half hours of time. Financially, even at a modest $16/guitar for lining, I was making roughly thirty bucks an hour. Binding is even better than that from a $/hr standpoint. Philosophically, it's sort of a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance thing. The closer I get to ripping the wood off the tree with my bare hands, the more I feel I built it rather than assembled it.
Third, on Koa. It seems prices have shot up over the past few years, and it sounds like it will only get worse as harvesting continues to become more restricted. Eisenbrand's prices are reasonable overall, and their wood is great, but I just spent close to $200 for 3 board feet of curly Koa. It's beautiful, and I can make almost a lifetime supply of binding from it. But that's a lot of money for a modest size board. What will the Koa market be ten years from now? And if you think prices will skyrocket, have you stocked up on whatever you will need/want in the future?
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), so I don't use kerfing anymore, either. However, if I were to go back to using kerfing again, I probably would elect to buy the ready-made stuff rather than fire up the jigsaw jig again and do it myself.
