Thank goodness for YouTube

Pete Howlett

Pete Howlett

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As a prominent instructor on YouTube I take time every so often to see what others are doing, Tips de Jour with Robbie O'briem etc and I got to thinking after a client expressed it about making my abalam rosettes bigger. So after viewing and reviewing Chris Paulick's video on his cutter I spent 4 hours making one today and I am a happy man. I'll post the results later this week but there are some highly refined wrinkles to what you see on his video - something which I am very conscious of.

ie: he made it look easy and when I came to it, it wasn't that straightforward.... now where have I heard that before? :nana:
 
It looks a fine idea, but I have a feeling it might just work better on a fret/scroll saw, especially the cross cutting.
And if I was to do one, I might make the width adjustable too. :)
 
Chris is a really great jig maker and very generous man to make all his jigs available online. I use the same jig for cutting shell blanks to rosettes and purfling.
 
??? of course it is! That is the whole design rationale. You watching the right video?
 
Chris Paulick - don't know if he is professional or amateur but he has a series of really informative videos on aspects of guitar building. You may not agree with some of what he does but there are loads of good ideas there... here's his channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/chrispaulick?blend=1&ob=video-mustangbase and the video I was refering to. Try to ignore the irritating music track:

 
Yep...fully adjustable for width of the piece and from the brief look at the bottom of the the part of the jig that holds the shell it is also adjustable for the diameter of the finished piece. It looked like he had several indexing holes to account for this. I've watched others of his videos. He is definately a thinker.
 
I'm not sure how much time Chris gets to spend building. I think his real passion is in thinking out ways of doing all sorts of things in innovative ways. He certainly has managed to contribute a fair number of very good ideas to the luthier community.
 
Pete Howlett said:
??? of course it is! That is the whole design rationale. You watching the right video?
Click to expand...

Yes, I've watched both that and the second one where he explains the jig in more detail.
The width I am talking about is the width of the substrate being used, which he is cutting to size from sheets.
My thought was to make the jig more versatile by enabling the adjustment of the two sides holding the substrate square. The reason, it would allow the cutting of random shell sizes also.
I grant that it would make the jig more complicated, as the sides would need to adjust as a pair around the centre-line, but it may be worth it.



 
Last edited:
Ablam is a shell composite - I doubt you could get abalone in any width or thickness these days because the shell breeding beds have a disease which is killing htem. Hence I suspect this is another soon to go on the CITES list given that Lacey has already gobbled it up! Besides who would want to fiddle around sliceing this stuff - it's hard and brittle, creates sparks if you are not careful ;)
 
I don't see why you would want to make the sides adjustable. When using real shell I glue it to a piece of wood that I do make the width of the holder but even if not full width the thumb screw holds the work firmly enough. I don't get any sparking or other problems cutting shell. Good dust control is an absolute must but other than that cutting shell is very simple and productive with this jig. I use LMI white glue to glue shell blanks to pieces of thin wood the width of the jig holder. After cutting soak in hot water to remove the abalone from wood. I've make two of these. The first one was too big. I made it while building guitars and it worked for that. The width of the holder must be slightly less than diameter of your rosettes. You can make other holders.
 
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