Making a unique guitar rosette..

A good, quiet night for inlaying the soundhole rosette into this old redwood soundboard...

Nothing ever gets thrown away in my workshop. Eventually, even the smallest of offcuts find their use. The rosette is just about the end of the line for most offcuts.. beyond that they're basically sawdust.

Making the initial 'log' is a messy and chaotic process.. a lot of glue, a lot of dust, sometimes a messy state of mind.. I start out with a basic idea, but it never comes out like that, so it's always something of a surprise to see it all once it's all put together.

This one is made from cypress, mahogany and padouk offcuts and various wood veneers. It took me hours to get all the pieces in place because I kept on getting hypnotised by it every time I added another tile.

Guitar making tip: (most guitar makers probably know this already but it's easy to forget, as I just did..).. When you've spent hours cutting the log into little tiles and fitted each one carefully in place, with painstaking attention to making sure all the angles are right so there are (almost) no gaps.. and then you've laid them all out in precise order around the channel you've made, and you're just about to finally glue them in.. but then you notice some wood dust in the channel...

Think twice before you blow away that dust.. you're also liable to send all those ornate little tiles flying.