Instrument – Guitar refinish with chip carved rossette
Top view of the refinished guitar.
I didn’t build this guitar, but refinished it using shellac and a french polishing technique. While I had it apart and stripped down to bare wood, I decided to carve and install a chip carved rossette. It’s extremely thin and seated/glued into a circular rabbet about 128th inch deep. The initial carving was done with the basswood somewhat thicker (about 3/16″ – 1/4″) and then reduced further from the back side to make it just slightly thicker than the spruce top of the guitar. I routed a very small shoulder (rabbet) around the outside bottom edge of the carved rossette so it would overlap the recess that was routed into the top, making a perfectly clean round edge.
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Top view of the refinished guitar.
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Close-up of chip carved (basswood) rossette.
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The back and sides of this Tacoma guitar are Koa - a beautiful wood to work and finish. The original finish had started to de-laminate from the wood, showing large ugly gaps between the film finish and wood.
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A close-up of the Koa back. The figure is much more prominent under the french polished finish than it was under the original (thick) film finish.
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While I was at it, I decided to replace the original plastic torsion rod cover with a chip carved piece of Koa - complementing both the primary wood in the guitar and the chip carving in the rossette. Koa is a lot harder to carve than basswood, but for such a small piece, it was doable.
Comments
Nice and good job MountainWoodWorks.
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