Circles and Squares - Designing a Rosette
One of the benefits of the apprenticeship is that in my spare time I’m able to work on my own projects. So, when I arrived I wanted to get started on my build as soon as possible. Working on the design of the rosette was one of the first things I did. Chris Morimoto gave some excellent advice, which was something along the lines of - “Don’t look at other guitars for inspiration, instead look at everything else.” With that in mind, I went digging through Ervin’s extensive collection of books in search of an idea. I found an interesting looking book on Islamic-Indian architecture, and in there something caught my eye. A blueprint of a tomb, which had two squares, offset.
There was something there that I liked, and I started playing with the idea drawing some squares around a rosette sized circle. One square on its own looked really strange, and at that point I thought the idea was not going to work. But as I drew a few more, it seemed to create a feeling of a turning movement.
I had a design, then I needed to figure out how to actually get it into my guitar top. This wasn’t going to be a straightforward and easy thing to inlay. I wanted the lines to be thin, to preserve the details of their intersection. The smallest inlay bit for Dremel was still bigger than I wanted it to be. It seemed the best option would be to cut it by hand. This would be a challenge, any gaps would be impossible to hide in a light coloured wood such as the European Spruce top for this build. I did a couple practice lines in the far corners of the top, and then a square on a scrap piece of spruce. My method of using a guide and cutting both edges of the line with a knife, then scraping out the wood in between seemed to work well, if very slowly. With that practice under my belt, I went ahead and inlayed it into the top. You can see that process in the video below.
The process of cutting and inlaying each square took about 7 hours per square. Here’s some more photos of the process below.
Rosette laid out, and practice square done.
The hook scraping tool was the blade from a fret slot cleaning tool which I sharpened and added a handle.
After sending it through the sander.