FINALLY I am starting another build after 2 years off.

[Kevin in California]

A little more progress this past week
The back is braced, the top is joined and the abalone rosette is installed.
I love using my own handmade small planes for carving the braces. Such fun and they work so well.

The rosette is not as perfect as I'd like, but it will be okay. It has been about 5 years since I installed an abalone rosette this way. I used teflon strips inbetween the outside and inside purflings, glued them in, pulled out the teflon and set in the rosette pieces, flooded with CA and Bob's your Uncle! A couple of small gaps around the purflings but nothing I couldn't take care of. The BWB purflings I got from Stewmac this time, instead of LMI and they were more stiff...not as flexible, and difficult to get them to push up tight against the routed channel.

So next step is cut out the sound hole and proceed with the top bracing...a fun part.

Kevin

[peter havriluk]

Love the abalone!

The heavenly powers protect damnfools dept.: I cut a soundhole two weeks ago and forgot to set the router pivot into the backing plywood. Ran full circle and now the router was free to roam around. 45 degrees of uncontained router travel. and the router bit somehow followed the arc just (tangent, really) of the inner purfling ring around the rosette. No rosette damage, had to thicken the purfling a bit and find a soundboard scrap with the right color and grain. I'll never tell and the fix is un-noticeable. But I had to change my shorts. Experience really is the best teacher.

[Kenny Wiebusch]

I would be interested in building the small hand planes! Are there plans anywhere? Guitar looks real nice!

[Kevin in California]

I like the Paua Abalone. This was solid shell too. I have some laminate strips from Duke Luthier that I've used in the past that I will be doing a top and back purfling with. It is also Paua but not quite as brilliant as this rosette, but it still comes out nice.

I do have some basic plans for the block planes. Enough to get you going and spurn your imagination. I will look them up and if possible post the PDF.

[Kevin in California]

K. Here are some simple plans you can use to make small to big planes, any shape you want, just follow the particulars
Have fun

Kevin

[John Parchem]

The guitar progress looks great. I was a little confused with your mention of the nylon strip when making the rosette. When I look at your pictures it looks like you routed channels for the BWB purfling and installed the purflings in those channels. I would have routed out the purfling channels installed and leveled the purflings (easy to keep round in the right size channels). Then I would come back and route out the area between the two purflings for the abalone. Never a need for the nylon strip.

I any case it looks great even in the closeup.

[Kevin in California]

John,
I did route the two purfling channels first, then routed out the area between. However, I only trial fit the BWB, did not glue them in. I have never done it the way you described, only because I am afraid of taking even a minimal amount of the black line off the purfling when doing that routing and having a problem there. Any little bit of runout with my routing setup could be a disaster, so that is the reason for doing it the way I do. I am using a dremel on a jig. The jig is fine but the dremel for sure must have a tiny bit of runout.
Now, that said, the other option would be to inlay the pearl first, then come back and route the two purfling channels and I considered doing it that way. It probably would have worked out fine.