Creating the sound board

So, the timetable has not been nice to us. We have been faced with endless CAT and DAT sessions which have prevented us from giving up our Friday afternoons to make guitars. Hence the two month hiatus.

But we are back… with the front. Once we had glued together the strips of wood for the front, the next task was to create the rose which will surround the sound hole. It is possible to buy pre-made fancy roses, but we decided to make our own simple patterns to adorn the front of our guitars.

THe rose is constructed by taking a number of thin strips of different colours and moulding them around a circular slice of wood. The colours I chose were red and black, whereas Mr M. went for orange and black. The rose is formed by alternating between layers of different coloured strips, gluing them back to back on the mold until the desired thickness is achieved. This stage took me as while as the stips of wood kept insiting that they were striaght, not curved, and snapping. But with the application of some heat (difficult to come by in Edinburgh in December) I made them pliable and soon had my completed rose.

The rose is then inlaid in the front of the guitar, surrounding the space where the sound hole will eventually be cut.

As with everything in the CDT department, there is the right tool for the job. In this case, a very heavy duty pair of compasses does the job. Two thin grooves are carved with the compasses and a channel is then dug out between them using a scalpel. That all sounds very straight forward, but I managed to break a blade and not cut my channel perfectly along the lines I had marked on the soundboard. But finally on Friday I managed to dig out the required channel. I knew I had gone far enough when I held the soundboard up to the light and was able to see through it.

I filled the channel with glue and pressed the rose in. Then, on instruction from Bert, I taped itdown and clamped two boards on it to make sure it didn’t move over the weekend as I let it dry.

Today I used a cabinet scraper to remove the exess wood from the rose that was higher than the channel was deep. And then sanded off any excess glue and was left with a beautiful rose inlaid in my soundboard.

The central sound hole was cut out by using the compasses again to carve a deep groove – all the way through the wood.

Progress is being made.