Rosette technique

There are many ways to do a rosette- this way seems very good as it insures a perfect fit.

1- Inlay the rosette (cut with a hole saw).



2- Route the purfling channels just touching the harder wood of the rosette to clean it up.



3- In these 2 pics, I’m removing a White from a BWBW making it a 0.060” BWB- perfect for that router bit which LMI sells.




4- Glue in purfling that matches the routed channel.

Similar to what I do. I make the rosette on a square sheet. I use a 1.5mm cutter in my circle cutting attachment for my router (this matches the 1.5mm bwb purfling I use to edge my soundholes) I then cut the outer circle first and keeping this setting I route the same diameter on the sound board. Repeat this process for the inner circle. I then change the router cutter to a 1/4 inch and progressively route out the soundboard to the appropriate depth between the two 1.5mm circles already cut. Then I glue in the inner purfling line held tight with dressmakers pins then the soundhole ring and finally the outer purfling ring. Pics below of one recently finished for a 12 fret 000 guitar. soundhole pattern is 84 pieces of hand cut maple veneer set into a mix of epoxy and bog oak dust. Bob

I cut out the channel for the rosette first and then just increase the radius slightly until a test piece purfling just fits. This is an incremental cut and maybe takes 3 or 4 or more routings. I get an extremely snug fit. For the inside ring I decrease the radius slightly and do the same thing. Obviously what you don't want to do is over shoot when you are getting close and make the channel too big. I get perfect fits and it is fast. Below some BWB purfling.



Just a piece of black purfling around some paua.

With shell rosette, it is best to not do what i did above- shell is very hard compared to wood so the technique isn't effective.