Making a rosette

[TonyinNYC]

I submit for all to see, my poorly documented effort at making my first rosette from scratch.
I had a beautiful piece of spalted maple that I wanted to use but it wasnt big enough to make a solid rosette from so I decided to make a rosette by cutting the maple into segments and gluing them together. Here are some pics:
This is a piece similar to the one I started with. It's actually the book matched piece to the one I used. Quarter is for scale purposes:

I then drew a circle the size of my soundhole on paper, 4 inch diameter, and divided it up into 8 segments and cut my maple into pieces that roughly fit the 8 segments:

I didnt worry too much about getting them perfect. I didnt really want the rosette to be 8 perfectly sized segments. I added a black line between each segment and I tacked them to the paper with some thin CA. My plan was that by gluing everything to a paper substrate, which would get glued slightly to the backer board as the glue soaked through the wood and paper, I could easily pop the rosette off of the backer and then using my drum sander, remove the paper from the back of the rosette. It worked. I got the idea from another forum and also from a TV show I saw on the making of Alpenhorns. For those of you who are not familiar with an Alpenhorn, here is a picture:

These giant horns are were used to call cattle in from the fields and also for communication in the Alps. When they make these horns, the temporarily glue the halves together with paper in between the wood halves so they can test the horn and then open it to refine the inside of it if needed. If not, it is opened, the paper sanded off, and then permanently glued shut. I figured if the technique was good enough for an Alpenhorn, it was good enough for me!
Back to the rosette:
I added some blue tape to hold the paper in place because it was not very firmly glued to the plywood backer board. Then I started routing out the rosette:

After a little clean up, here is the rosette sitting on the top that will become its home:

A small piece broke off while I was cleaning up the edges, but I put it back on later in the process of installing the rosette.
In the next post, I will show how I installed the rosette with CA in a cedar top.
Thanks for looking and comments are welcome.

Tony

[TonyinNYC]

The easiest way for me to get a tight rosette channel is to route the channel in phases. First, I routed for the maple ring and installed it with thin CA. I sealed the channel with shellac since CA will stain softwoods like spruce, cedar or redwood among others.
In this picture, I have installed the wood ring then routed the channels for the purfling rings and sealed those with shellac too:


You can see the mess of spaghetti I will be putting around the wood ring. I find that it's really difficult for me to use duco or TiteBond when I am trying to wrestle this octopus into the channel. As a result, I get the various rings set into their tight channels and then use thin CA to glue it all down by dropping the CA on top of the rosette. Taylor guitars uses this same method so don't believe the nay sayers who claim you MUST use Duco or TiteBond for a rosette.
Continuing, here is a shot of the rosette all glued in and mostly scraped flush:


And here is a close up after I scraped it all the way down. Notice the tight fit, the cedar is not stained, and the rosette is looking good.


Thanks for looking and please feel free to comment or ask questions!

Tony

[Kyle Barbour]

Looks really good Tony. I'll be trying this on my next guitar.

[TonyinNYC]

Thank you sir! I will be documenting a solid ring rosette in the near future but John Parchem did an excellent job of documenting his rosette process in this thread:
http://www.acousticguitarconstructionfo ... f=30&t=102
I highly recommend checking out his process. John utilizes a drum sander but the process can be modified easily enough. I cut completely through the rosette blank to cut the ring out, but the method John shows decreases the risk of the wood ring breaking while routing it out. Plus, John is building a beautiful guitar in that thread!

[Dave Bagwill]

The whole alpenhorn thing was a little troubling; however, I once saw a busty good looking blond wearing lederhosen and nothing else, so I forgive the Swiss the alpenhorn, Riccola, and shepard's pie and almost anything else. Bit off-subject.

[Kyle Barbour]

That is a nifty way of making the rosette john has. Don't yet have the thickness sander but I'm working on it. Gives me another reason to look into it more.

[David L]

Nice rosette Tony!

David L