Patrick DeGreve's travel guitar

[Patrick DeGreve]

I am going to make rosettes for the two guitars from cut offs I saved from past projects. I save a great deal of cut-offs for pegheads, and rosettes etc. These pieces are spruce, mahogany and wenge.

[Patrick DeGreve]

I glued the cut-offs onto a piece of plywood and drilled a hole for the stewmac precision dremel tool. I then set up both soundboards and the plywood with the scrap pieces on my work table side-by-side. As I route the rings for the purfing, I routed the scrap without changing the settings so I will have good fitting pieces to fill the rosette with.

[Patrick DeGreve]

Here is a shot of the rings routed for the purfing.

[Patrick DeGreve]

I then glued in bwb purfing into the recess, and scraped and sanded them flush.

[Patrick DeGreve]

I next set up the router to route a recess between the two center rings for the pieces of scrap to fill. I removed the inside and outside waste from the routed scrap leaving only the rings.

[Patrick DeGreve]

Next I cut the rings into segments being carfull to keep the cuts going through the pin hole so all the pieces will join well.

[Patrick DeGreve]

I then glued the pieces in the recess changing the colors to make my paterns. I then scraped and sanded the rosettes flush.

[Patrick DeGreve]

Here is a shot of the two soundboard rosettes.

[Patrick DeGreve]

Here is a shot of the two soundbaords after I cut out the sound holes.

[Jason Rodgers]

I like your rosette process. They look cool, too!

[Warren May]

I like the process for your rosettes, too. The side assemblies look good. A little closer shot of your finished rosettes would be nice to see.

[Patrick DeGreve]

Hi Warren, Here is another shot of the rosette. I'm not sure it's any better, but if you click on the pictures they enlarge, so you can see them better.

[Patrick DeGreve]

I cut the braces from the best pieces of pine I had. I pre-shaped them to the 15 foot radius. They look a little large to me for the small size of guitar, I might have to scallop them after they are dry, we will see how the soundboard taps. They are only 1/4" thick, but pretty tall (5/8"). I chose a simple X brace and one tone bar per side for the steel string guitar, and a fan bracing patern for the nylon string one. The fans are 3/16th" X 1/4" tall.

[Patrick DeGreve]

Here is the nylon string bracing.

[Warren May]

I like it!

[Bryan Bear]

I like it, nice and clean. It's hard to tell scale on the pictures with the small body, but the ss braces look tall to me.

[Greg Robinson]

Looking good Patrick, very industrious. My project seems like a bit of a cop-out by comparison!

[Patrick DeGreve]

Bryan, they are small guitars, and I think the braces were a bit too much. I scaloped the braces (on the steel string) and tapered them quite a bit. The pine soundboard sounds good when tapped. I don't want to take the braces down too much because of the pine not being as strong as the spruce I have used in the past. Here is a picture of the braces after I re-worked them.

[Patrick DeGreve]

Here I glued the soundboard to the sides using the go-bar press. I did the same thing with the nylon version.

[Patrick DeGreve]

I trimed the soundboards with a flush trim bit on my router. Here is a shot of the two travel guitars from the front.