September 24, 2008

Larry is going to procure an LR Baggs pickup for his OM Maple, but that’s not the reason I’ve sidelined to work on the parlor.  I am going to resume neck shaping on the OM, but wasn’t in the mood tonight.

I decided to begin installing the rosette for the parlor.  This will be my first foray into using abalone.  Charles Fox suggested a method which I will employ:  Rout the channel for the BWB Abalone BWB center ring, glue in the inside BWB with a strip of teflon where the abalone will go followed by the outside BWB.  Let it dry, remove the teflon, then press in the abalone arcs (after dressing the cavity with vinyl sealer), then flood the abalone with superglue.

In order to get the channel just right, I devised a rosette jig, a scrap piece with the properly measured channels pencilled in with a small routed channel about 1″ long for each.  This will allow me to reproduce the dremel settings without doing “test cuts” on the actual guitar top.

080924rosettejig.jpg

First, I’ll rout the inner and outer channel and install the BWB, let dry, scrape, then tackle the center ring.

080924rosette8.jpg

Ring one! (Outside)

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Ring two! (Inside).  I slapped some wax paper on, set on a caul and put my old heavy bench plane on top to hold down.