Black Plastic Binding

This was my first attempt at binding. I did two guitars. I used a clamped down hair dryer to do the bending. It was fine. I tried super glue for the first, but my lack of experience worked against me. Fixing mistakes afterward was trcky I found. For the second, I used acetone mixed with ABS shavings. It worked very well and was quite easy to touch up any areas that I didn't quite get right by either adding a little extra goop in an open crack or dabbing straight acetone on an area that needed better adhesion and retaping it. It was a great product that I'll definitely use again.

Black binding are great! Bindings looks clean and high quality. Excellent fit for my project!

If you need plastic binding material this is a good value.

I had never bound a headstock before and I chose to go with a Black/White/Black triple layer for my first attempt.

I only used acetone for the 'glue', and it was interesting to see how well it worked - perfectly!

I notched the headstock all around the edges with my Dremel tool and then pre-formed the binding in hot water, and as it cooled I used lots of rubber bands to hold it snug to the head.

Working out any areas where the binding would stand away from the head, I took my time and when it was right I just used a cheap kid's paintbrush to wick the acetone between the binding and the wood of the head area.

I let it stand for about 20 minutes and then went to the next color and did the same thing again with the rubber bands and the acetone on the same small paintbrush.

That sat for a total of about 10 minutes and I put the final layer on for a complete B/W/B triple binding.

Using the back side of a new utility knife - not the cutting edge, but the back area had a lip on it from the manufacturing process and it worked perfectly to shave the excess off the binding.

The headstock is shown here and I even have a custom logo made for me - but if you've never tried to bind a headstock, I can tell you that the material SM sells is nice to work with and using just acetone for the cement is fine as long as you get good wicking of it into the wood - but binding-to-binding it's very easy.

When you are shaving it, it smells like PVC, and perhaps even a clear PVC glue would work.

I would like to suggest that you take some 80# sandpaper and scuff up the surfaces that will be bound together first to make sure that you get deep penetration of the acetone so it can actually 'weld' the plastic together. I never had any problems - but I can see it happening if you don't get good saturation.

Really nice to work with and looks great!

I bought some binding for my fretless bass. It was my very first working with binding and no problems at all.

great material,easy to use and finish,thinner binding arrived with white marks from being over bent during shipping maybe but scraped out easily....will buy again

Easy to work with. Just as I hoped

Great product

I bought a strip of the 0.090" width to go on a Les Paul and it has worked as expected so far, no problems. It adhered superbly using the recommended "Weld On #16" cement, is easy to scrape smooth and was plenty long enough to do the face side of the Les Paul body in one strip with about 7 inches spare.