Replacing Binding - is it that hard?

[narad]

So as I've mostly moved on to buying old guitars and trying to restore them -- I figure if GAS is good for anything, it might as well funnel money into saving old guitars from firewood, kind of preserve the work of those 80s guys. But one thing that's pretty common is messed up binding. Plastic can shrink, or start to peel off, and then can get caught on something and snap. People alway bash headstocks into things and break binding. And in the case of my favorite guitars, ESP horizons, they basically just come in the one binding color: white.

I usually ask ESP to do the work restoring these guitars, but there's one thing they won't do, and that's replace binding. Really sucks because for some planned colors, black binding would be the right way to go, and the original binding is not necessarily in good condition to begin with. Yet they insist, with a reply that uncharacteristically reflects almost no consideration, ~"not possible". But frankly, to me, a guy totally ignorant of how to actual do it, it doesn't seem that hard? Particularly in the context of getting a refinish and a refret.

Is this true? Do you think other luthiers would be able to do this without much hassle? I sort of feel like if I had the frets off, I could at least replace the 3 pieces of binding that run along the fretboard, and seems hard to mess up, but ESPs direct "no" gives me caution.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Binding on fretboards is a bitch and a half to replace, and a lot of the time it means a board replacement, especially on ebony which is prone to cracking. A fret job doesn't necessarily mean the binding will be easier to replace either, sometimes harder.

It's similar to inlay replacement/rework, it's rarely worth it, for technician or client, and thus it's usually fairly rare to find folks really really good at it that don't charge an arm and a leg and/or are easy to book with.

As for the process itself, binding isn't meant to be removed. So removal is something of a process, and you have to be careful not to damage the fretboard or neck. Once you remove the binding itself you need to clean up the channel, which can be pretty time consuming in its own right. Then as far as reinstall, binding isn't one size/color fits all, so you have to do what you can to match any other binding, or use whatever, and then fit, cut, and shape to specific instrument.

Food for thought: a lot of builders don't do binding at all, even on new builds. Large manufacturers have whole departments devoted to just binding because it's so specialized.

 

[xzyryabx]

Wow, wasn't aware of any of this, thanks for sharing.

 

[Neon_Knight_]

As for the process itself, binding isn't meant to be removed. So removal is something of a process, and you have to be careful not to damage the fretboard or neck.

Does this mean Gibson LPs aren't meant to be re-fretted? I presume the binding 'nibs' are their way of saving time and money on fret end finishing, without worrying about the extra work it creates for maintaining a guitar after they've sold it.

I've seen plenty of examples posted online (including a thread on here, after a GC re-fret) where binding has cracked during a re-fret. I had assumed this was because the binding had been removed and then reattached to facilitate the re-fret, but now I'm thinking it must be due to trauma to the binding when frets are removed / inserted.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Does this mean Gibson LPs aren't meant to be re-fretted? I presume the binding 'nibs' are their way of saving time and money on fret end finishing, without worrying about the extra work it creates for maintaining a guitar after they've sold it.

I've seen plenty of examples posted online (including a thread on here, after a GC re-fret) where binding has cracked during a re-fret. I had assumed this was because the binding had been removed and then reattached to facilitate the re-fret, but now I'm thinking it must be due to trauma to the binding when frets are removed / inserted.

It's significantly harder to do binding nibs than any fretwork. It's actually why Gibson stopped doing it on regular USA models, no one really understood or cared for it anymore, so it was cheaper and easier to omit it. That was another thing they had a whole group of people especially for. If binding in general is "hard mode", nibs are "nightmare."

It's also why most Gibson refrets don't bother either, especially after the client gets the quote.

Plastic binding is fairly unforgiving vs. wood binding. As it ages it gets more brittle and if you damage it it's almost impossible to hide.

Most binding work I did, and what you see mostly in general, is spot repairs where a small length of binding is damaged or missing and you have to splice in a new piece. That's actually not terrible.

You can definitely refret guitars with binding, you just have to be more careful and mindful of it.

Les Paul Customs are a perfect storm of factors that make refrets more challenging, you have binding, fat inlays, and ebony. Each are another fee.

 

[nickgray]

Try to imagine how the neck looks without binding, it'll have this tiny tiny rectangular channel along the edges that you glue the binding to. Now think about what it's like to remove the glued binding and to clean those channels. Glue doesn't want to come off nicely, it'll leave tons of gunk and you can take little chunks of fretboard along with the binding. Then you'll have to slowly, methodically clean up all that glue residue along this tiny rectangular channel. Then you'll have to fill the chips and sand them. You can look it up on YouTube, it looks as miserable as it sounds. I would not be surprised at all if it's actually less time consuming to completely replace the fretboard and maybe add carbon rods in the neck along the way just because you can.

Binding in general sucks. I'm not a tech, but virtually all guitars I've seen with fret lift issues have binding. It's very likely because you have to clip the tang of the frets along the edges in a certain way and then file the clipped part flush. So the edges of the frets on a bound neck don't have any tang below them. Coincidentally (it's not, of course), it's almost universally the edges that end up lifting on the bound necks.

It also looks like ass on all but high end guitars (not Gibsons though, it also looks like ass on Gibsons, but maybe not as criminal as on more budget instruments). Binding is a piece of plastic crap that you have to glue absolutely flush to the fretboard, then sand it so it's absolutely flush with the fretboard, then scrape and sand the plastic so that it's rounded over. Manufacturers just don't bother, it's too labor intensive and requires experience.

So why do they bother? I don't even know. Not only it has zero functional benefits, it's has severe downsides. Aesthetically, it's questionable if it looks better, and it is one hundred percent not even remotely worth it in terms of ratio of the work and experience required to what you actually get aesthecially plus the serious functional downsides. Like, it's just a different colored strip on the neck. Who even cares. But because guitar players are crazy, every Gibson style guitar (in very broad terms) MUST have binding. Yet meanwhile, barebone Fender like design is somehow just as valuable and valid. It's almost as if the industry (or the customers, rather) values aesthetics over the functionality, but surely that can't possibly be right, musical instruments should be functional first, and looks should be secondary. Oh well.

 

[narad]

I would not be surprised at all if it's actually less time consuming to completely replace the fretboard and maybe add carbon rods in the neck along the way just because you can.

One door closes, and another one opens.

 

[CanserDYI]

Painted binding makes so much more sense to me.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Try to imagine how the neck looks without binding, it'll have this tiny tiny rectangular channel along the edges that you glue the binding to. Now think about what it's like to remove the glued binding and to clean those channels. Glue doesn't want to come off nicely, it'll leave tons of gunk and you can take little chunks of fretboard along with the binding. Then you'll have to slowly, methodically clean up all that glue residue along this tiny rectangular channel. Then you'll have to fill the chips and sand them. You can look it up on YouTube, it looks as miserable as it sounds. I would not be surprised at all if it's actually less time consuming to completely replace the fretboard and maybe add carbon rods in the neck along the way just because you can.

Binding in general sucks. I'm not a tech, but virtually all guitars I've seen with fret lift issues have binding. It's very likely because you have to clip the tang of the frets along the edges in a certain way and then file the clipped part flush. So the edges of the frets on a bound neck don't have any tang below them. Coincidentally (it's not, of course), it's almost universally the edges that end up lifting on the bound necks.

It also looks like ass on all but high end guitars (not Gibsons though, it also looks like ass on Gibsons, but maybe not as criminal as on more budget instruments). Binding is a piece of plastic crap that you have to glue absolutely flush to the fretboard, then sand it so it's absolutely flush with the fretboard, then scrape and sand the plastic so that it's rounded over. Manufacturers just don't bother, it's too labor intensive and requires experience.

So why do they bother? I don't even know. Not only it has zero functional benefits, it's has severe downsides. Aesthetically, it's questionable if it looks better, and it is one hundred percent not even remotely worth it in terms of ratio of the work and experience required to what you actually get aesthecially plus the serious functional downsides. Like, it's just a different colored strip on the neck. Who even cares. But because guitar players are crazy, every Gibson style guitar (in very broad terms) MUST have binding. Yet meanwhile, barebone Fender like design is somehow just as valuable and valid. It's almost as if the industry (or the customers, rather) values aesthetics over the functionality, but surely that can't possibly be right, musical instruments should be functional first, and looks should be secondary. Oh well.

Fret lift has nothing to do with binding, which only removes a tiny amount of fret tang.

It's mostly due to the board shrinking and pushing the fret outwards, if the frets were properly installed to begin with.

You run into poorly seated ones a lot though, which is usually from being a little too delicate with the arbor so you need to use two actions which fucks up the tangs.

 

[nickgray]

Fret lift has nothing to do with binding, which only removes a tiny amount of fret tang.

I can't help but think that it contributes, and likely quite a lot. The tang might not be the whole story, but it has to be something that's connected to necks with binding. Like I've said, I'm not a tech, but just from looking at lots of guitars in the shops, it can't be a coincidence that all the guitars where the fret edges lift enough so that you can see them visually lifting had binding. The most egregious ones were two LTD EC 256s made in 22 and they had such a high fret edge lift that you could push them down with your thumb, like around 1mm lift, really prominent. The local humidity over here is usually 60% or so. It could be due to AC, like if they were stored right near an AC vent or something like that, but I dunno. You'd also expect other guitars to have fret sprout if it's due to humidity, but I haven't seen even one where the fret edges are legitimately sharp and pokey, at worst they're ever so slightly rough.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

I can't help but think that it contributes, and likely quite a lot. The tang might not be the whole story, but it has to be something that's connected to necks with binding. Like I've said, I'm not a tech, but just from looking at lots of guitars in the shops, it can't be a coincidence that all the guitars where the fret edges lift enough so that you can see them visually lifting had binding. The most egregious ones were two LTD EC 256s made in 22 and they had such a high fret edge lift that you could push them down with your thumb, like around 1mm lift, really prominent. The local humidity over here is usually 60% or so. It could be due to AC, like if they were stored right near an AC vent or something like that, but I dunno. You'd also expect other guitars to have fret sprout if it's due to humidity, but I haven't seen even one where the fret edges are legitimately sharp and pokey, at worst they're ever so slightly rough.

I have been a tech for many years. I've seen thousands, if not tens of thousands, of guitars, I would never say that binding is a contributing factor.

The most common factor is time. It's that simple. If the fretboard isn't given time to rest after cutting it'll shrink. How much it shrinks depends on a lot of things, but if you let it sit before fretting you get better outcomes.

Time is money, so production stuff, and usually the cheaper production stuff, doesn't have that time to settle.

Conversely, expensive guitars can be rushed out the door too, and not surprisingly that also causes these issues.

When you see photos of guitar building locations and see guitars, necks, boards just sitting around it's not because the maker is lazy, it's just this stuff needs to rest.

 

[tedtan]

Binding has a functional benefit in that it helps absorb energy without denting in as wood would when an instrument is banged into a hard surface. This was especially important for acoustic instruments where the top, in particular, is much softer and more delicate than an electric guitar’s body.

As for why Gibsons have binding and Fenders don’t, Gibson built acoustic guitar with binding before they built electric guitars; Fender didn’t.

Nibs have no real purpose. Gibson still does them because they are traditional to Gibson guitars, but they don’t offer anything over a properly dressed fret end.

 

[bostjan]

Binding has a functional benefit in that it helps absorb energy without denting in as wood would when an instrument is banged into a hard surface. This was especially important for acoustic instruments where the top, in particular, is much softer and more delicate than an electric guitar’s body.

As for why Gibsons have binding and Fenders don’t, Gibson built acoustic guitar with binding before they built electric guitars; Fender didn’t.

Nibs have no real purpose. Gibson still does them because they are traditional to Gibson guitars, but they don’t offer anything over a properly dressed fret end.

Correct. Binding serves a couple other purposes on acoustic guitars as well, but no actual purpose on electrics other than aesthetics.

As for fretboard binding, I've heard the argument that it protects the fretboard from damage, but I don't understand that. Ebony might be a tad more brittle than vinyl, but a lot of these bindings aren't even proper vinyl, and a lot of bound boards are rosewood, which is tougher than many of the binding materials anyway. And I've heard some of the old guys say that the binding keeps the frets from poking out, but, and feel free to look this up and discuss, but I'm 100% certain that the frets aren't going to care. If the fretboard shrinks, either the binding will break or the frets will sprout out and poke through the binding anyway. Even if the binding were tough enough to hold the fret ends in, the fret would be forced to bow upward and pop out of the slot. In any case, not a good outcome.

Odds are that fretboard binding is a long-left-over practice from when fretboard woods were softer or that it was just done purely for aesthetics from the get-go. Either way, it offers nothing of functional value to a modern solid body electric guitar.

 

[CanserDYI]

I personally really enjoy bound necks, an LP doesnt feel like an LP without it. I also like the fret nibs, my 2018 Classic had fret nibs, I thought that was something they were still doing?

 

[Neon_Knight_]

It also looks like ass on all but high end guitars (not Gibsons though, it also looks like ass on Gibsons, but maybe not as criminal as on more budget instruments). Binding is a piece of plastic crap that you have to glue absolutely flush to the fretboard, then sand it so it's absolutely flush with the fretboard, then scrape and sand the plastic so that it's rounded over. Manufacturers just don't bother, it's too labor intensive and requires experience.

5 of my 8 Ibbys have fretboard binding. I don't prefer the feel of binding compared to the 3 without. I only really like the aesthetic of the binding on my J. Custom (flamed maple binding), and perhaps on my S2170SE (imitation bone binding). The white plastic on my 2x RG2550Z doesn't exactly make a Prestige look more "prestige" IMO. The binding on my Indonesian XPT700 is definitely inferior to the 3 Prestiges I have with plastic binding, but that is primarily due to the clear coat (the thru-neck + binding were clear-coated together...good luck replacing that binding without refinishing the whole guitar!).