Time to glue the binding on and no longer postpone this task (didn’t actually look forward to that). The glue I used officially has a 5 minute drying time (24 hours to cure completely), but I found out the plastic binding almost immediately melted and tacked to the wood, so it came out to be a very stressful experience. Next to that, I found it very hard to control the amount of glue applied to the joint, resulting in too much excess glue around the binding.

After attaching the binding and securing it with binding tape, I also clamped the neck between to small straight bars, ensuring the binding set in a straight line. It looks a bit overdone, but here’s the assembly while curing:

After a few hours I removed clamps and tape (it isn’t needed anymore for the glue to cure any further and I don’t like to leave tape on the wood any longer than needed), and got this:

The overall result is good, I’m satisfied by the looks of it; but the amount of cleanup needed disappoints me… most fret slots are flooded with glue (varying from a mm to almost a cm inwards). So that’s going to be the next episode (one I hadn’t planned actually).

The part I’m really pleased with is the bend around the fingerboard end. I bent it previously with a simple hair dryer and I used lots of binding tape while gluing to keep the binding fitting tight around the corners. This is the result, where you can also see I need to do a lot of cleanup: