#28 Wheat Purfled
It has been a while…. I finished this guitar almost a year ago. And then I got lazy. No pics. No writeup. But here it is in all its purfled glory. I decided to learn some new skills and make some fancy purfling for this one. I purfled myself out on this one…
What is purfling? Purfling is the decorative strips that are placed around the edges of the guitar to create contrast and add a little “bling.” Usually, purfling is straight strips of thin wood or plastic. The most common type of “fancy” purfling is herringbone pictured below.
For this build, I decided to make my own purfling in a very fancy asymmetrical wheat pattern. Making the strips of purfling took almost as long as building the whole guitar! It is a very time consuming and tedious task involving gluing, cutting, re-gluing, re-cutting, et. thin strips of wood veneer over and over. If you are interested in seeing the whole process, check out master builder Garrett Lee’s video:
The following pics give some of the highlights of the process with descriptions in the captions.
Make a jig for measuring, gluing, cutting, etc.
Assemble 20-30 strips of .5mm veneer in the right order to give the final pattern.
Glue and clamp all the strips.
Cut the glued block into two segments.
Cut the long strip into short blocks at the right angle and re-glue
Re-glue, recut, flip, re-glue, re-cut, flip, re-glue....
And POW! Purfling magically appears.
It took about a week to make these very small pieces of purfling. As Garrett Lee says in the video, these are the most expensive pieces of wood in the shop because of the time and effort it took to make them. However, they make a real statement on the guitar.
A few pics of the inside of the guitar and then a few more of the finished instrument.
The top on this guitar is low grade cedar which would have been rejected by most builders because of the variation in color. Some folks are just silly. The back is East Indian Rosewood.
The purfling exercise was a good learning project to up my skills a little. Don’t know that I’ll be ready to do it again anytime soon. But the upside is, I have enough purfling for 3 or 4 more guitars.