The final steps for my rosette ; inlay the wood strips into the inner and outer grooves.
I’m doing one side at a time since no real time saving, and giving me time to do the task and to verify. For this design, each side is having 3 sets of homemade purfling, and using the middle one to fine tune the overall fitting. If I’m using hide glue for most of the works, like inserting the previous center motif and the purfling built, I rather like the use of poly glue for these last inlay works, and plenty of open time as well.
Soundboard in progress. It is a German spruce table that was selected for this guitar, and having over 8 years old.
Once the first leveling of surfaces done, which includes an additional margin of about 30% usefull for the work of the rosette, it is the tricky work of doing the rose which require a high level of attention and care.
The required procedure for that model is divided mainly into 4 steps: realization of the central pattern, routing of adjacent grooves, followed by the inlaying of the wood strips in each groove. Curentlly only the last 2 steps remain.
A good bunch of finishing work mostly done for this 10 years old cedar/braz (2009).
The original finish was french polish for the top and nitro for neck/body.
1) Restoring the top :
The cedar top alone was having over 180 dents and scratches. It was like a chicken having picked his dinner over the top. First, it was a slow process filling as most as possible the dents using shellac. Once the surface having sufficient leveling, some french polishing sessions will bring the finish back in a good condition.
2) Restoring the body (When the cups are not welcome to the party…) :
Since many succion cups and nitro are one of the worst match a guitar can think of, here, three of them left permanent marks on the treble side. Also a large section around the junction of the back and the sides at lower block was also destroyed by heat or some contamination.
Once surfaces cleaned, and usually in such situations, to the bare wood, I first sealed with a light clear coat. then I had to spray and matched the original light translucid (homemade recipe) toner, and followed by a bunch of clear coats. Nothing fancy here, but the triky part is to sand it all perfectly flat to get a nice blend between new and old.
Nitro is nice at this.
