I used my Go-bar jig to glue cleats over cracks in the guitar tops. I use small wooden blocks lined with a piece of 4 mm Yoga mat as a caul. This step is one of the reasons why I made my Go-bar jig, you can glue without problems anywhere in the top. Almost all the cleats 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 bridge" that was not glued but only sat in five screws. Amazing. The screws originally attached to a 3 mm thick bridgeplate in maple on the inside. I replaced the bridgeplate with one in spruce with reinforcements in hardwood around the string holes. To give attachment to the screws, I used small round washers in tough plastic that can not crack or rattle. A cool fix! I needed extra many clamps for the bridge which of course was glued with hot hide glue as it should.

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