Rosette Routing Contd. & Fixing The Hole In The Soundboard - Day 8

DAY 8 - (HOURS 2.00, TOTAL TIME 19.30HRS)

So after along time of trying different ways to get the sides down to some sort of usable thickness, I decided to take Tony up on his offer of a friend up the road with a machine sander. I had tried all sorts of ways to bring it down; belt sander, hand sander, hand planing etc. There's only so long you can do it!
Have a look at how the wood came up:

- even without it being fine sanded, the back and sides are shining.

- a bit blurry, but you can see the contrasting colours in the Madagascar Rosewood.

I started straight into getting the wedge down to size that I put in the top. I just used the hand planer on both sides, as I will be sanding it at a later stage.It brought it down from this:

To this:

I set back up the soundboard on the routing pin and got back to routing out the channel for the rosette:

- the first sweep got rid of most of the channel. I just needed to trim the edges...

- you can see the small difference there in the centre where the second circle is about 1.5mm too far away from the line.

- beautiful! One 0.9mm channel routed.
It went an awful lot smoother this time around, I was sure to keep checking depths and the like, and made sure the depth-setter was tight!

With the channel finished, I dry-fitted the rosette in place, then used a thick superglue to stick it in place:


- The fit was a very snug one, I was afraid of breaking the rosette as I was forcing it in, but it has to be snug, so take your time, but not too much or the glue will have dried! Wax paper and some weight and it was left for an hour or so. Thick superglue is a longer drying time, so the window for getting it right is greater.


The next step now is to cut out the soundhole, you don't need it now that the rosette is in. When the rosette dried in place, I tried a few methods that weren't the best idea for gouging out the wood. Have a look:

- using the routing bit on the drilling machine I tried to use it in the same manner but it didn't work. It caused some chipping on the underbelly.

- I tried the same machine with a rounded routing bit, but it was obvious the revolutions weren't enough.
- after a delicate job with the router held by hand, I managed this. I wouldn't recommend this method, one slip and you've ruined your soundboard!

- with the thin piece of wood left, I used a scalpel to cut it out roughly.

- I then sanded the edges a small bit...

- working my way down from 60 to 100grit.

- as you can see from the next photo, the centre line of the soundboard isn't really in line with the gap in the rosette, but this is because the first piece of Mother of Pearl in it is cracked, so I moved it around so that the fretboard will hide it.

Close enough for me! I've left about 0.5-1mm of extra wood around the edge of the hole, just in case it gets hit by something, or a clamp pinches it when we'll be putting on the bridge at the end. It never hurts to be cautious!