Construction:Top:Ornamentation:Rosette

The Grand Rosette

Grand Celtic Knot Rosette--(click to see full size)

The Concert Grand and Baby Grand models receive carved rosette soundholes. The construction begins with creating the surround inlay. This is an exacting multi-step process involving some precision and dexterity. The surround is laid in three segments of custom-made four-part purfling, with a miniature diamond at each interruption.

A jig is made to receive and shape each segment of the surround. This enables us to cut the segment accurately, and trim its ends to fit the diamond. The purfling consists of 4 layers of commercial dyed pear veneer, lightly glued together and sliced into strips .050" thick. The strips are trimmed to approximate length, laid into the jig, and lightly coated with a cyano-acrylic (CA) glue, to fix it into shape. Then it is trimmed as shown at left.

The segments and diamonds are then laid into a ring routed into the top. The ring is about .050" deep, and .100" wide. The diamonds are made of four fine strips of boxwood, glued together with blackened glue. Then slices are taken off to create miniature diamonds.

The top now receives an intermediate varnish finish, consisting of two or three rubbed coats and a brush coat, bringing it to this state, ready for carving. (The ruler is included to give you a sense of scale. It is distorted by the camera's el cheapo closeup lens.)

Next a paper pattern of the design is glued on with rubber cement, and trimmed. The negative spaces will be routed with miniature bits, so we want the pattern to be an edge to be followed by the router. The paper used is free of clay (a common paper component that helps fix printing ink), because we will be carving right through it. Carving through the paper is a trick with two benefits. First, it gives a very high contrast boundary so you can hold a line with the knife, and even go back and re-enter a cut (a fancy trick indeed at this scale!). Secondly, the paper, being homogeneous, stabilizes the knife during cutting, helping to keep it from following the grain during the cut. So cutting through the paper gives much more accurate results.

Now carving can proceed. Both soundholes are carved progressively, so that the work proceeds symmetrically. Any development of technique is given to all the work, so that the eye cannot detect a progression between holes.

Dwain Wilder

My guestbook has excellent anti-spam features for your protection as well as mine. Please write me there at Guest Book