Acoustic Guitar Construction

The guitar is looking great!

I used the basic dremel circle cutter on my harp ukulele would not make a small enough circle on the harp neck. It worked OK. The bishop Cochran base is really nice though. Having all the fine adjustments and the weight of the base makes for stress free operations. It is very expensive. I have seen home made or hand made Lexan based router bases with some of the same type of adjustments as well.

Kevin, I'm curious about the width of the abalone in the rosette. I noticed a vendor offering both 3mm and 5 mm wide abalone rings, and yours are installed with some concentric rings, all of which allow me to get lost in the materials - - - if you can, please share the width with us. Your rosette give me a great preview of what I had in mind, but I don't know what I'm looking at.

Thanks very much.

We supply 3mm Abalone with our kits, you can get a feel for the scale pictured here in Dave's thread.
viewtopic.php?f=30&t=983

Peter,
This shell in 3mm. The BWB purflings are .060". I have used a 1/16" bit in the past to rout for the BWB but is just alittle bit sloppy for my taste, so this time I used a .055" bit, made the cut then fudged a little bit and made a second to open it up a bit. I got a very good close fit, and the result is very clean. My center ring with the abalone was not as good....because the shell was not a consistent width. It varied about .004" with some pieces. I have more of this shell and NEXT TIME I will cut my channel smaller and sand the shell down to the thinnest piece so they are the same and fit better.

Kevin

Thanks very much for the explanation.

Okay the grandkids are gone as of Saturday. We had a great time (about 5 weeks) and not too many things need to be fixed around the house. I can now get back to this build. The rough braces are being glued to the top this week. I'll post a pic when the carving and cleanup is done.
It feels good to be making sawdust again!

Kevin

Sawdust and more pics! YEAAAHH!!!!!!