#1-The Rosette — tyson hand-did

The Rosette | The rosette is the ornamentation around the soundhole on the front of the guitar. On classical guitars, it is usually a fairly ornate decoration made from a matrix of wood slices. On steel string guitars it can anything from narrow concentric purfling strips to abalone to wood to a combination of some or all of those components. I decided to make a custom rosette for the guitar from some rosewood I had. I am also going to bind the guitar in rosewood so I thought that would be a nice combination.

I took the very thin sheets of rosewood veneer I had (1.3mm thin!) and cut that into 12 wedges at 20 degree angles with the grain of the wood oriented parallel to the wedge shape from top to bottom.

I then glued these wedges together to make a circle.

Now, using my Dremel attached to my circle cutter I cut out the rosette to its final form and sanded it smooth.

Now the scary part - routing the rosette channel into the top of the soundboard. There are many ways to do this - by hand or using power tools. Again I used my Dremel with the circle cutter and a 1/4 inch router bit. I did some test cuts in the top of the plates to make sure I had everything set properly. One wrong move, loss of concentration, or flub here and the top could be ruined. As Robert O'Brien says, the "pucker factor" here is very high.

The channel for the rosette was only .89mm deep which allowed the rosette to sit proud of the surface to be sanded flush after it is glued in place. Everything came out very nicely. After some fine shaping with my razor blade scraper and 320 sandpaper, the rosette fit nice and snug (a few small gaps that I will fill when finishing the guitar). I glued the rosette in and let it sit under pressure for a couple of hours then came back and scraped and sanded it all flush.

Very pleased with the way it turned out. Once it is scraped and finished, it should add a nice unique look to the guitar.