Official Luthiers Forum!

Well because of my limited hands-on experience, I am coming
to you fine folks to see what you guys prefer for abalone rosettes... solid
shell or abalam. I am just about finished with my first rosette which I used
solid shell from Andy DePaul. The stuff looks great and seems easy enough to
work with - plus the price was very reasonable. It seems like the abalam would
be less expensive, but I haven't seen it anywhere for the $20 I paid for this 1/8" stuff - and he gave more than enough to go around.

So I guess my question is - what do you prefer and why?

I'll post pics of the rosette in various stages soon, I have to finish sanding it down flush and I will be done.

Thanks All!
Christian

_________________
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Louis Hector Berlioz

Chansen / C hansen / C. Hansen / Christian Hansen - not a handle.

Christian

Christian,
My preferance is for solid shell. Ablam is so homogenious that it just does'nt look natural to me.

Solid shell takes more time to fit the small pieces but is well worth the effort.

Cecil

For me it is natural shell. Ablam is thin layers of natural shell laminated on top of each other. As long as you do not need to sand the thickness Ablam works great on flat surfaces. But on fretboard inlays you can get funky patterning because you have parts of many layers showing due sanding to the curvature of the Fb.

Even on flat surfaces if you need to sand sometimes you get the top layer so thin that it is translucent and the layer below it will show through.

These are the only reasons I do not use Ablam

These are the only draw backs to Ablam. After all it is real shell just a buch of thin layers of it

Solid Shell: 2
Abalam: 0

Is the workability easier with abalam? I am positive I could have done a better job fitting the pieces together with the miters around the channel, but the stuff doesn't seem that hard to work. Websites that sell abalam always say things like "it breaks cleanly"... does that matter?

_________________
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Louis Hector Berlioz

Chansen / C hansen / C. Hansen / Christian Hansen - not a handle.

Christian

yes ablam tend to have less wast due to bad breaks and or unseen worm holes. Yes abalone get parasite worms but once you learn to work reall shell the wast is not bad.

OK, I'll be the odd man out.

Abalam is perfect for flat surfaces, small or narrow pieces, saves shell,
allows the use of more colorful shell that's too small for solid pieces (e.g.
paua), is much quicker to inlay than solid due to the way it fractures, AND
is perfect for CNC cutting. By the way, it also cuts easier if you're cutting
your own.

It is not good for curved surfaces (wide one-piece inlays on fingerboards),
engraving (though Chuck's working on that), or some types of less
figured shell (e.g. MOP, gold MOP) since the joins are more obvious.

I use abalam for rosettes because of all the reasons I listed in the first
paragraph and because I prefer the precision of good CNC cuts for this
application. The rosette is typically too narrow for the joins in abalam to
be a problem, unlike large inlays. If the channel is cut with some
precision, using a good laminate trimmer rather than a Dremel-type tool,
there's no problem with sanding through the upper layer of shell.

So, why waste shell by unnecessarily using solid? This too is a limited
resource and it behooves us to be as careful as we can!

Rick Davis
Running Dog Guitars