Aside from the herringbone pattern and adjacent veneer pattern, the rosette is also made of a central ring of tiles. The tiles are made from veneer, glued and recut in order to make the pattern. In the first photo you can see the component veneer sandwiches needed to make the + pattern. I glued up three different veneer blocks of five maple and black veneer sheets.
I glued up two different logs with the same veneer sandwiches, but in a different order. This gave me an X pattern and a + pattern. Then I cut the logs into small tiles.
Using a circle cutter tool designed by Geza Burghardt I cut a channel in the soundboard. Before this I had carefully located and drilled a hole at the correct place. The circle cutter allows a precise depth of cut to be made, in this case about 1.5mm.
With the outer and inner boundaries cut, a few intermediary cuts allow for easy removal of wood. The channel was cleaned up with a chisel.
With the channel complete, I test fitted each of the tiles. To make the square tiles fit in a round channel, I gave each a slight taper.
The tiles were glued in place with 2 part epoxy mixed with ebony dust. The ebony dust made it completely black, which hides the small gap between the two tiles. In this photo you can see some of the epoxy on the spruce. Once the tiles had been allowed to cure in place overnight I cleaned up the excess epoxy, and extra height of tile with a small plane.
The inner and outer channel for the herringbone bands were then cut with the circle cutter and chisel. Then the herringbone and assorted coloured veneers were bunched together and pushed into the channel. White PVC glue was used to persuade them to stay there.
After drying overnight under a nice flat caul the rosette is ready to be revealed. I was so excited to see how it turned out when i started cleaning it up.
The shavings that were created during the cleanup are one of my favourite aspects of the build so far. They're such pretty 'waste'. So that's the rosette. After this I'll be moving on to the other side of the soundboard, and the braces that make it stronger, and dictate the kind of sound that it has.
