Monday, March 12, 2007

THE ROSETTE DESIGN

Over the past year and a half I've been playing around with ideas for a rosette design from different mosaic, as well as solid wood, center motifs, to various borders, etc. etc. but, to a great extend I was never really exited about what I came up with.

Then, one day I stumbled over a website of a luthier called Joshua Alexander French whose rosettes greatly appealed to me. French studied guitar making with Jose Romanillos, and Romanillos influenced French' own method of approach, a design made from tiles constructed from 'solid' pieces of wood rather than the traditional mosaic tile made of veneer slivers.

With this design I have tried to do my own spin on the 'solid' wood tile. Most notably I have moved the center of the tiles taper away from the center of the rosette itself, resulting in a parallelogram shaped tile rather than the typical rectangle or a square tile.

It has been my ambition to create a design where the connection of the individual tiles should be completely seamless, resulting in a motif that will appear as a continuous one rather than a design made from repeated segments. With this particular design, an 'overlapping' motif consisting of two identical halfs, this should be possible, or, at least the transition from one tile to the next should not become an obvious one.


After I had finalized my design however, I realized that this would present it's own unique challenges, when it comes to tapering the tile so they will form a circle when they are put together. With mosaic tiles this is typically done either after the tile is constructed or all the tiles vertical columns are tapered evenly before it is glue together. With this method it will be necessary to 'build' the taper into the vertical tile parts and adjusting the horizontal ones accordingly.


PRELIMINARY SKETCHES

DIFFERENT COLOR SCHEMES

FINAL DESIGN



Saturday, March 10, 2007

CARVING THE HEEL


PART 3.


Not much to report. Followed Cumpiano's method. Again, The most difficult procedure was 'turning the corner'; Marred the internal heel a bit in the process. It seems that once the first bevel is down you have to cut very little on the next two. Same goes for the final scraping.


It has taken forever to get to this point. Not that I really mind, I have enjoyed it tremendously, however, I have my doubts about finishing the thing for August as planned.

On to the rosette!




CUTTING SECONDARY BEVEL

SECONDARY BEVELS CUT

SECONDARY BEVEL CLOSE-UP

FINAL HEEL SCRAPING

FINISHED HEEL

FINISHED HEEL

FINISHED NECK

FINISHED NECK

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

CARVING THE HEEL


PART 2.


It's been a while since my last post. I've been busy getting my wood storage organized as well as other things. It is slowly getting there. I also build a rack for our garden tools as well as a place to hang my bandsaw blades.

WOOD STORAGE


BINDING STORAGE


Yesterday I started to cut the primary bevel of the heel. William Cumpiano states that on classicals this is best done with a skew knife in order to accommodate for the integrated heel block. As I didn't have a skew knife I proceeded to carve with my chisels instead, and the heel block did in fact get in the way a little. However, since the bevels on my chisels are honed to a 30º angle it wasn't to bad. Next time I might try and get hold of that knife though.

A bit like when I cut the slopes of the side of the heel, I started the cut with the back of the chisel down. About an inch or so into the cut I flipped it over and continued with with the belly down. This seemed to work fine, however, as the cutting progressed it got harder and harder to turn the corner in one pass as Cumpiano suggest. The chisel kept digging in the wide side of the turn and I had to take it in small passes to get it somewhat smooth. As usual the second operation went easier than the first. Tonight I will continue with the secondary facets.

CUTTING PRIMARY BEVEL

CUTTING PRIMARY BEVEL

CUTTING PRIMARY BEVEL

PRIMARY BEVEL FINISHED