Making the rosette

Well for the guitar #3 I wanted to keep the ornaments simple, so I decided to do a simple wood rosette.
I had some nice burl wood from RC Tonewoods for the rosette.
At first I tried to use the manual cutter to cut it, but at some portion the wood is brittle and for that part it literally crumbles to pieces when I cut it.
So I resort to my circular routing method and it works fine.

Cutting using the circular cutter.

The rosette.

Routing the rosette

Outer circles routed

Inner circle routed.

The rosette.

The rosette with surrounding purfling. I bought the purfling off eBay.


Then I began to scribe the circle for the rosette.
At first I use my manual cutter to scribe and concentric circle then chisel it.
I discover I was too slow... (I didn't have much time to do it)
So I resort to my B&D RTX (dremel equivalent) with the circle jig.
Thing got fast and because the outer and inner rims were scribed, the circle didn't appear too bad.
The inner was remove using chisel but much less materials to removed.
Then I threw in some PVA glue (dries transparent) and glue and clamp the rosette.
The fit wasn't too great but since there will be a purfling border I guess it should not matter too much.
The purfling channel however must be perfect, as there will not be any more room for error.

Scribe the circle

Rings of concentric circle

Chiseling time

Cutting the channel with RTX (dremel). Still have some more waste to remove with chisel.

Testing fitting the rosette in the channel

Base of the channel almost flat by using the chisel.

White PVA Glue in the channel

On the rosette too.

Glue in the rosette with squeeze out cleaned.

Rosette clamped
After I removed the clamps, I check that the burl rosette was inlaid quite nicely.
I shave it down using my Stanley new sweetheart low angle block.
After that I began to scribe and inlay the inner channels.
After scribing the outline of the channel, I use the RTX to remove the materials.
I test fit the purfling and it went it snugly.

Leveling the rosette with a LA block plane (new Stanley Sweet heart low angle block plane)

Almost leveled

Looks rather nice.

Scribing the channel

Test fitting the purfling

Inner ring test fitting done. Looks OK.
Now when I was doing the outer ring I made a terrible mistake...
I switch to a 3mm router bit I thought it was a good fit for the purfling.
What a mistake I made.
First I route too deep and 2nd I routed into the rosette.
What is worse is that I have already scribed the channel...
Now the channel is too wide at some parts.
What can I do at this point? nothing.
I just glue in the purfling and indeed the outer channel is too deep and it can't stay there.

Start to glue in the purfling

Inner ring done nice and tight.

Start gluing the outer ring

The purfling doesnt want to stick insider the channel....

I have to resort to tape to stick it back into the channel.

From far the rosette looks quite nice.

Front view

Near view.. you can start to see all the mistake. Inner ring is nice but not the outer ring. Lesson learnt never change method 1/2 way... Argh...