erich@muttcrew.net
Well-known member
Hi Chuck, yes that dreaded grain tear is one of my concerns - I tried routing a channel in a piece of cedar yesterday and the first go was pretty awful, and I don't think the spruce is going to be any easier, so I'll really need to put in a few sparring rounds before I do the first real channel.
I did put a few spit coats of shellac (thinned 1:1 with alcohol) on the rosette wheel first and I guess it helped some, though the underside of maple was alarmingly ragged, but it cleaned up just fine.
I was thinking about making a tip for the Dremel that acts as a knife blade to just score the surface before routing - not a rotating blade, just a sharpened bit that would fit into the Dremel for optimum placement, which you would then use with the soundhole thingy to trace the circle. Might be worth a try and not a lot of effort to make.
We started out doing all the pieces at the same angle - there were 18 pieces so 20 degrees each. I cut a little template out of beech wood and used it both for the initial tracing and the preliminary shaping. Then when all the pieces were done we laid them together and there were some slight imperfections in the fit, so I just took a few of the pieces and corrected them individually this way and that and kept checking and re-checking until the fit was perfect. It wasn't really all that hard to do, but of course the manual corrections mean that the rays are no longer all the same angle, so they look a little "random".
I did put a few spit coats of shellac (thinned 1:1 with alcohol) on the rosette wheel first and I guess it helped some, though the underside of maple was alarmingly ragged, but it cleaned up just fine.
I was thinking about making a tip for the Dremel that acts as a knife blade to just score the surface before routing - not a rotating blade, just a sharpened bit that would fit into the Dremel for optimum placement, which you would then use with the soundhole thingy to trace the circle. Might be worth a try and not a lot of effort to make.
We started out doing all the pieces at the same angle - there were 18 pieces so 20 degrees each. I cut a little template out of beech wood and used it both for the initial tracing and the preliminary shaping. Then when all the pieces were done we laid them together and there were some slight imperfections in the fit, so I just took a few of the pieces and corrected them individually this way and that and kept checking and re-checking until the fit was perfect. It wasn't really all that hard to do, but of course the manual corrections mean that the rays are no longer all the same angle, so they look a little "random".
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