Acoustic Guitar Construction

After gluing in the abalone rosette I was pretty happy with the result. However disaster struck when I tried sanding it down even with the wood surface. The black purfling created a lot of sanding residue, which contaminated the surounding wood surface. I learned the hard way that sanding black plastic over light wood is not the best thing to do. After checking with Ken as to how I could resolve the problem I used an Olfa knife blade to scrape down the rosette. That removed most of the black stuff inbedded in the wood fiber, but not all of it. Then I wet a paper towel with Isopropyl alcohol and lightly scubbed the affected area. This completely lifted off the remaining contamination. It's a huge relief to have saved my work, I'll tell you.

Here are some shots so you can see what I had to deal with. When it comes time to level the body purfling I'll use a scraper.

Thanks for sharing this. Recovery from disasters often have the most needed information. your rosette looks great.

Nice save Dennis, looks great now.

I always now use a scraper or razor blade for this kind of work and sometimes a block plane when there's a lot of material to remove.

I too found out the hard way on one of my early guitars when sanding some ebony binding near to a very pale sitka top, but I did find out that as I progressed through grits the ebony dust eventually disappeared once I went about 320 grit. Ebony dust is the devil's spawn!

Bob

Excellent!!

Obviously you know what you are doing -- I'd warn others however to take care when using the different solvents on the light color sound-board. Sometimes when mixed with dark wood or plastic dust the solvent turns into a very effective wood stain/dye and it will penetrate deep into the wood pores -- not good. Just a heads up

Nice save! For future reference, a scraper is a much better choice for this job.
Glad you saved this one and nice rosette!!

This rosette turned out really nice. It looks scary when that black dust appears to be in the wood, but on spruce which doesn't have open pores, it will sand away pretty easily. Not sure how that would be on cedar.
Nice job.

Kevin

Brief commercial break --- this is the standard rosette on all our Gibson style KMG kits