Used my Go-bar jig to glue team patches over cracks in the lids. Uses small wooden blocks lined with a piece of 4 mm Yoga mat as a counter. This part is one of the reasons why I made my Go-bar jig, you can easily glue anywhere in the lid. Almost all the pieces ended up in the "blues guitar" 🙂

Another detail is to glue small birch stop blocks on the end of the top braces. Takes longer than you want.

A big advantage with hot hide glue is that you can smudge as you like, it is always easy to wipe off the excess with a damp cloth and a coarse brush.

The mandolin had its top braces glued as well.

A new detail on all of them is a reinforcement in spruce under the fretboard. You want to prevent the neck block from moving when you tune up. Otherwise you can get a too high string height when the guitar settles down after a while. With a dove tail, there is sometimes less than 1 cm of glue joint between the neck block and the top exactly where all the force from the strings presses, in addition, usually it is end wood in the neck block against the top and a weak glue joint. With an approximately 6 mm thick spruce plate, which also get supports from the top brace above the sound hole, you get a large and good adhesive surface that holds the neck block in place. The extra weight is not great and the sound is not affected (that part of the top is chained by the fretboard glued on top). I think it is a big improvement in terms of sustainability in both the short and long term.

Here are som pictures of the batch as it looks now. I glued in some spruce patches under the bridges where fibers came loose.

The harp guitar has a "monster stand" that was not glued but just set in five screws. The screws originally attached to a 3 mm thick maple saddle plate on the inside. I replaced the saddle plate with a spruce one with hardwood reinforcements around the string holes. To give attachment to the screws, I instead used small round washers in tough plastic that cannot crack or rattle. Cool fix! Needed extra many clamps for the stable which of course were glued with hot skin glue as it should be.

I thought that the top needed an extra brace above the sound hole as well.