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Howdy all, and welcome to my build #10, The Rose (EDIT: formerly #6, The Black Rose, but put on hold for some years to gain more experience, and renamed because the rose inlays aren't black, and I'm going to be building more rosewood tops in the future and want to save the Black Rose name for one with Brazilian top/African blackwood back/sides and black MOP rose inlays).

This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time; a rosewood topped guitar. Not sure why I'm so drawn to the idea... I just love the tap tone of rosewood so much, and the sound it imparts as a back wood, I suppose the goal is just to get more of it Not to mention the gorgeous appearance, and fun of proving that it can be done.

Main woods are Indian rosewood soundboard/neck/fingerboard, Malaysian blackwood back/sides, curly pink ivory binding/rosette, and either African blackwood or Brazilian rosewood bridge. I'd rather not curse it with Brazilian restrictions, but the blackwood is rather heavy when I'm already battling the weight of the soundboard itself.

The soundboard is a wonderful dark plum color with a lighter stripe in the middle... as good as it gets for Indian. Fingerboard is an unusual lavender color, which I got in a bundle of 10 low grade fingerboards for $25 Neck is sort of gray/green, from LMI. Works out nicely since the Malaysian blackwood is greenish as well, and goes with the rose theme as the stem color.


It will be similar to 000 size. 12 fret neck, 19.5" body length, 15" lower bout. Scale length is 25", and will have a Florentine cutaway. I've done one experimental rosewood top on my prototyping guitar, which is 16" lower bout and 14 fret neck. It sounds good, but I think a little smaller would be even better, and the 12 fret neck should help avoid balance issues due to the weight of it being rosewood as well.


I'm still debating whether to do the neck as a bolt-on M&T or integral Spanish style. Integral is so much more fun, but so much more risk 30 years from now...

So far all I've done is join the plates, scrape and shellac the show faces, cut out the soundboard shape, and lightly route the soundhole to mark it for rosette positioning. And that's what's next... the rosette. It will be pink rose petals, right to the edge of the soundhole.

Looks like a slick build! I'm excited to see how the rosette turns out; what are you using for inlay material? I love following the active build threads, looking forward to watching yours.

*EDIT* Just realized you already said what you're using for the inlay - pink ivory.

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Finally got this rosette finished up

Trace each piece on a new sheet of paper, cut them out, use those as templates to mark the wood, and go at it with the jeweler's saw...

I have two shades of pink ivory here, to differentiate the petals a bit. Both from Chris V., the lighter piece was supposed to be a rosette blank, but a plain ol' ring is just too plain for me The darker piece goes with the bindings I'll be using on this guitar, as an end wedge. I'd rather do a more elaborate wedge anyway, so that bit of wood is better put to use here.

So, hold each piece in place and score around with StewMac inlay scribe...

Normally I glue them down with a dot of elmer's for this, but that would have taken forever since all these pieces have bit of overlap, and there are no reference points to tack down more than one piece at a time. Luckily the pieces are pretty big, and on a flat surface it's easy to hold them in place. I have to score all the pieces before inlaying any of them, because they have to go in in a specific order due to the layering.

Then the first round of inlaying. These are the back-most petals, that will have other pieces overlapping their corners, but don't need anything else to be done before them. Route around the edge with 1/16" bit, and clear out the middle with 1/8" bit. Then back to 1/16" bit in the pocket and a needle file on the piece itself to fiddle the fit.

Glue in with hide glue, let it dry, plane down close to level, and scrape flush.

Notice that some of the pieces have flat edges on the inside. Just a matter of convenience since they'll get routed through when cutting out the soundhole anyway.

Then on to the next round of pieces. I have to re-score them to get the marks on top of the already inlaid pieces. The existing marks on the rosewood make it easy to line them back up right where they were before. Then route 'em out...

And repeat until done.

Turned out great Almost no gaps, which is fortunate since they stick out like a sore thumb on light woods like this.

Also, the top is planed to thickness and soundhole cut out and everything... ready to brace as soon as I get the neck and sides ready to build up the box afterward. About .070" thick, 193 grams. Plenty light enough, and stiff enough too. I'm not sure what bracing pattern I'll use yet... also, I may go with a spruce or redwood bridge plate to keep weight down. Or maybe Brazilian plate if I use the Brazilian bridge. Could be a while before I have to decide, since I'll be working on my challenge build as well in a couple days.

I get it now. You're doing a rosewood soundboard to make inflating that complicated rosette easier. It would have been near impossible to get it to look that nice in spruce!
I'm kidding. That's very nice.

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That is going to be stunning! Kenny Hill had an all-rosewood classical at the Healdsburg Festival last year....it looked and sounded great! Cool idea, and I'm looking forward to following the entire build.

Wow, hard to believe it's been over 3 years since I started on this one Got sidetracked by that OLF challenge build, then chickened out and decided to wait until I'd finished a few more things for experience before continuing this, and then have been working on it bit by bit along with other stuff for the past year. It's pretty far along now, so I'm gonna get the thread back going again

I ended up deciding that the rosewood neck blank was not up to my standards (curved grain, bends a bit when the humidity changes), so I switched to black walnut. Using a 1x3x24" blank from Hibdon, plus a 1.5x3" board I bought locally for the heel.

Start by sawing the scarf joint. Then plane the shaft piece nice and smooth, tapering the thickness from 3/4" at the heel to 5/8" at the nut, and trying to get the runout along the back of the neck as low as possible.

Then cut the truss rod slot with my trusty Veritas plow plane. So much more pleasant to use than a router The tapered blackwood strip along the side of the slot controls the depth, and gives a bit of curvature to it as well. This is a 3/16" wide slot for an old fashioned compression rod.

Then dig out the adjustment nut cavity at the headstock, using a chisel and gouge. You can also see the heel block here, which is a rather interesting shape It's made of two pieces, carved before gluing them together so I could get that deep hollow with a gouge. Can't reach in there now that it's together, so it never could have been done from a single large block.

The truss rod itself is a steel rod bought at the local hardware store, which I sanded smooth, threaded one end with a thread cutting die, and bent the other with a propane torch to make an anchor that will go in the heel (heat where you want the bend, hold it on a brick with the hot spot at the edge, and hammer on the end to bend it down). The nut is from StewMac, and washer bought locally.

Then glue on the heel and the headplate. I'm using one of the soundboard offcuts.

Draw on the headstock pattern:

And then a detour to make the fingerboard so I can use it to mark the neck taper. I always forget to take pictures of the slotting process. I make 3 sets of knife marks using a straightedge with 1/64" graduations, then line up a wood block to the marks and clamp it down, and gently hold the saw against the block while cutting to get it perfectly straight and square. For the binding, I cut some Malaysian blackwood strips from the back. Also made some pink ivory side marker dots from the same stock as the rosette.

Then saw the neck taper, and carefully carve the last bit to match the fingerboard width.

Then chisel the sides of the headstock to the pattern, and jeweler's saw the crest. The two little cuts for the point in the center are rather awkward to make since I don't have a good way to hold it in the right position.

Then saw the curved lines with it laying on its side, and refine with chisel, gouge, and needle files.

Next step is the slot in the heel for the non-cutaway side. First score with a knife and chisel a groove to get the slot started right where I want it. Saw to full depth from there. Then stick a scraper in the slot and hold the saw against that to make a second cut to widen the slot.

And then carve the heel and neck and back of headstock... which I didn't take any pictures of. For normal heels I mostly use a 3/4" violin knife. For the cutaway side of this one, I also needed my trusty giant #8 gouge and flexible card scraper. I also use those two on the concave part of the headstock.

I'll post more pics of the heel in the next update.

More heel pics, as promised! The cutaway transition:

The lovely symmetrical endgrain produced by vertical lamination:

And here you can see how a 12 fret cutaway with a low profile heel gives just as much reach as a 14 fret with chunky heel. Thumb can remain on the back of the neck all the way to the 11th fret.

Next up is the bridge, so I can use it to drill the pin holes in the soundboard and position the braces around them. Route the slot, drill the holes, taper the thickness from the back side so those things get tilted back at a bit of an angle, cut out the shape, chisel the wings down, scrape and sand it nice and smooth.

Then start preparing inlays. These pieces are koa, and the stock they're cut from is over twice as thick as I needed, so I sliced each one in half, holding them in the cam clamp there. Two for the price of one, and nicely symmetrical too

Then score around them, rub chalk on to make the marks more visible, tape it down, and use some diamond stones as a routing platform. Note the stick under the far end, to tilt the plane a bit. I'm routing the near wing in this shot.

Then put the stick under the other side to tilt toward the other wing, and route it. Also drill a bunch of holes.

Glue everything in, sand and scrape smooth again, and give it a coat of shellac.

My favorite bridge I've made yet! The colors are just perfect
Here's a shot from the side to show how thin it is at the back edge. I really scraped off every bit I could to get the weight down. 24 grams, which is really light for African blackwood.

Next up, the fun part: bracing!

Love the bridge Dennis. I agree the colors are perfect!

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So first step toward bracing, glue the neck to the soundboard. Dremel router to cut the shelf on the headblock portion of the neck, because it's easier to get consistent depth that way than by hand with a chisel. The neck pocket and soundboard end are carefully fiddled so when pushed together, the neck side-to-side angle is aligned with the centerline. I also used a knife, chisel and scraper to cut a little curved pocket into the heel for the cutaway side to glue into later.

Once the neck is on, pin the fingerboard to it and use that to position the bridge, and drill the pin holes through the soundboard. Then use those holes to position the bridge plate and lay out the bracing.

The bridge plate is spruce, with grain in line with the soundboard for stiffness. The pin plate is Indian rosewood on top of that, and I wish I would have chiseled off and tried again because I didn't get it positioned at quite enough of an angle to match the pin holes, so the high E ball end will be very close to the edge of it. It'll probably be ok, but still makes me nervous, and there's no replacing it at this point since it's buried underneath all the other bracing (sorry Hesh). I think I'll glue the bridge on before closing the box, so I can ream the holes and slot for the strings and see if I need to splice in an additional piece.

The braces are all notched together, at heights varying from 1/16" to 1/4". Most of the tape bits mark where the X will go, so I can position the smaller braces around it. Others are stuck down for reference just before gluing braces so I can get them positioned quickly.

Several rounds of gluing and carving later, it's finally time to close it off with the X... which has notches for every other brace except the upper transverse

Glue it on...

And carve as far as I dare for now. I'll probably do more once I get to the open backed box stage. The tap tone is interesting. Sort of a clang. It sounds hard.

Then bend the sides, which were the most combative I've ever tried to wrangle with. Even at .050-.060" thick and using a wet paper towel on the pipe to provide steam, and a wood block to mash them flat so they can't cup away from the pipe to avoid being heated, they refused to bend for the most part. Cupped hard enough to split in a few places, fractured here and there, twisted and kinked... they don't retain their shape when sitting around loose either. Flatsawn Malaysian blackwood is not a good thing to make sides out of. I almost scrapped them, but decided that I'll probably be keeping this one anyway since it's so experimental.

CA the splits, epoxy the fractures, scrape the inside a little bit flatter, and sand the rest smooth since the ripples are about as deep as the thickness of the sides Trim to length, and glue to the tail block.

Sand the cutaway miter (which was a challenge in itself, trying to flex it to flatten out the cupping while sanding), and glue the corner block to the short side. Then stick 3 strips of tape on it to make a hinge to keep everything aligned and apply pressure at the cutaway tip once I fold it closed.

I left the corner block partially square so I could get some clamps on it to flatten out the cupping. With well behaved wood this can be held by hand, but I'll be doing it this way from now on since it saves time and probably makes a stronger joint. The block can be chiseled into my preferred triangular shape later.

Then glue that to the tail block as well, again using 3 strips of tape to align and squeeze together the sides at the tail. You'll see later that it made a flawless seam

Next update will be gluing that whole rim assembly to the soundboard.

I'm considering renaming this guitar to "The Rose" instead of Black Rose, because 1) the rosette is pink, not black, and 2) if this works, the true Black Rose will be Brazilian topped with African blackwood back/sides. On the other hand if I decide that rosewood tops are a bad idea, then it'd be a shame never to use the awesome name Any thoughts?

Continuing on with the build, the sides fortunately didn't warp too much before getting them glued to the soundboard. Still haven't found a good way to clamp the cutaway side to the heel, so I held it by hand for 10 minutes or so. Cutaway corner and tail block got clamps. Then come the dentellones.

The planes are there to weight it down since the soundboard alone was wanting to have a bit too much neck angle. Coarse and fine sandpaper to fit dentellones to the not-so-square sides, flashlight to check the fit, and paper towel to dry fingers after rinsing glue off in the glue pot water.

Here's the worst of the side fractures, drowned in epoxy. That hole in the heel is because the first time I tried to install the truss rod, it turned out the hole I drilled for the anchor wasn't quite deep enough. But I couldn't get it back out, so I ended up having to drill up from the bottom so I could push it out. I could plug the hole, but it shouldn't hurt anything anyway.

Yes, there is a dentellone past the end of the upper transverse brace there, and no, that was not intentional. At first I had the brace ends trimmed right where they should be fore the pattern, but then when fitting the sides and doing the cutaway miter, it looked like the side from the waist up was going to be 1/8" or so inward from there, so I trimmed the brace ends back further. But lo and behold, after the cutaway is glued, it's right where it should be... and my brace ends are trimmed way too far. Not sure if I did something stupid, or if the sides moved on me. The X could be reached by the dentellones, but not this one. But it's still close enough to reach with an extra big side brace, and the cutaway corner is very stiff on its own, so I think it'll be ok.

Here's that nasty side split, too.

Next step is to taper the sides, which is done by block plane, and checking against the bench with a flashlight around the edge to locate high and low spots. Also trim the top overhang, which unfortunately involved a chisel slip leaving a small scratch on the top near the tail, which can't be sanded out since the plate is so thin. But it probably won't be noticeable to anyone but me after it's been pumice filled later.

Then glue the side braces.

And back linings. Use some old soundboard offcuts to make sticks, which are profiled like reverse kerf because it clamps better and I think it looks nicer, but kerfed in the non-reverse way so it's no problem if I accidentally cut all the way through. The cam clamps are just stoppers to hold the wood against while sawing (left clamp for the first kerfs of a stick, right clamp for the last kerfs).

Plane those down, sand the rim against a sheet of sandpaper clamped to the bench to level out any irregularities (I wish I had a bigger sheet of sandpaper, and more room so the neck doesn't run into the wall and stuff), and we've reached the open back box stage No more humidity worries.

Tapping on it now, it actually sounds pretty darn good just like it is. The east and west quadrants are maybe still a little tight, but since I'm going to glue the bridge before closing, I might as well wait until then before doing any more brace carving so I can get as clear of a picture of the final tap tone as possible.

I also glued some cross grain reinforcements for the long split, so it shouldn't be opening up again.

And a patch for the cutaway fracture (after leveling out the epoxy mess of course). It looks like a Nicoderm patch, so I decided this guitar has a crack addiction But since the patch itself cracked while flexing around that tight curve, I don't think it's having much luck trying to quit

You can also see the side brace reaching over the gap at the upper transverse brace end there.

One last update for the year!

Since I'm going to glue the bridge before closing the box, and the bridge has pointy bits that can't be French polished around, I need to do the top binding and polish the top before closing. But to do binding, I need to scrape the sides level, which is somewhat more difficult on an open backed box since you can't put much pressure on it. But not too difficult really. It's just a matter of how you grip the guitar and scraper, so it's sort of a pinching action rather than pushing.

The sides leveled out remarkably well. I used a thick scraper at first to level the high spots, and then a thin flexible scraper to smooth the low spots and blend it all together. So they're not flat all over, but a lot closer to flat than I thought I was going to get, and they look great.

And here's the tail seam. The barest hint of the big crack is visible here near the light glare, but otherwise all the flaws have pretty much disappeared. Gotta love dark colored woods

I also wanted to get the back done while the humidity is still good. Thinned it down a lot more, to around .06-.07". It tears out like crazy, so I ended up doing a lot by scraper. But it also dulls scraper edges quickly, so that was a pain having to do the full resharpening process over and over. And there are still a few divots left... oh well.

It's very much interested in having a radius. Fortunately in the direction I want, but also very much more than I want. Almost an inch dome height in the middle

But at this thickness, it's flexible enough to flatten out without cracking. Though I did crack it in a couple spots anyway. Plus it had some cracks right at the flatsawn grain center that had been filled with some kind of epoxy or something before I bought it, but weren't filled that well and thus fell apart at this thickness. I feel a little ripped off being that I bought it from Allied when I was a noob, assuming that anything they'd sell would be high quality But anyway, I glued them with CA, and inlaid a couple offcuts at half the thickness of the back for reinforcement.

Mostly invisible after scraping smooth (left is scraped, right isn't)

Then make the back braces, and fit the ends of them to the pockets in the linings.

Note the stick taped to the back to hold it somewhat flat The bits of tape on the braces are so I can press the back down onto them, and then pull them up. Mark where they are on the back (I use strips of masking tape), and glue inside the marks.

These braces are almost 1/2" wide, to provide more glue area so they can hopefully hold on in high humidity. I carved them using my big beefy gouge, to a sort of Eiffel tower profile. Removed over 30 grams of bracewood, and made the tap tone higher in the process They'll be getting carved down more later. Current back weight is 308 grams, which I think will be pretty lively. The strip of tape here is to protect the plate from the corner of the gouge. It's not exactly sharp, but still leaves small scratches.

Still need to add the center reinforcement, and possibly some Somogyi style crack catcher veneer strips. And then it's on to binding.

Did the binding on this one a while back, and here are the photos. First step, score with gramil. Then chisel away a thin layer of soundboard wood, score again, chisel away, until I've worked through the soundboard and down to the sides/linings.

Then repeat the process, scoring and chiseling on the side wood.

And finally clean up most of it with a needle file, and sandpaper in the waist area.

Bend the bindings (which were surprisingly cooperative), trim to length and miter the cutaway tip (chiseling/sanding, no fancy tricks, just do it), and glue 'em on.

I use hide glue for this, which is a fast and messy process, using excessive glue and mopping it up with paper towels to keep it from gelling too fast. The binding doesn't really need full strength along the entire length of the strip anyway, but I like to reheat it over a fire on the kitchen stove to reactivate the glue as soon as I've got all the tape on. Usually get a few more beads of squeeze-out here and there.

Then scrape them level. I glued the cutaway piece last, and unfortunately cut it a touch too short, so it has a small gap before the heel. Irritatingly imperfect, but not really big enough for me to worry about.

Then steam out a bunch of little dents. You'd think a rosewood top would be hard enough not to get them the way redwood and cedar do... but you'd be wrong.

Wet paper towel, pan of boiling water.

Then round over the bindings with rasp, file, sandpaper, scraper. Add shellac, and admire the lovely color

Unfortunately, the binding tape pulled out a lot of my previous pumice filling on the soundboard, so I had to redo it. I guess my dreams of finishing the top before building the guitar were not meant to be. As usual, pumice filling was horribly difficult. Sandpaper with alcohol can grind up plenty of slurry in a hurry, but getting it to stick in the pores is another story. Pumice on a French polishing pad can grip and drag it around, but for the most part it wants to accumulate everywhere except in the pores. I eventually got it close enough, and sanded off the excess slurry. Then failed to get all the sanding scratches out:

But I was too frustrated with it at that point, so I set it aside for a while. Then a couple days ago I did a bunch of scraping to get rid of the scratches. Takes forever because the pumice in the shellac dulls the scraper edge every few strokes... but it's still faster than sanding. Then one round of polishing, one round of micromesh, a couple more rounds of polishing, and it's all nice and shiny now:

Not perfect, but there are no major flaws, so I think I'll leave well enough alone.

Next up, gluing the bridge. I don't think I'll be able to rub joint this one. I'm not looking forward to making a perfectly fitting caul for the inside with all those braces. I wonder if I could cheat and use a big blob of friendly plastic...

Looks fabulous . Thanks for the boiling water tip. I hate those darn dents.

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A lot of people use a soldering iron or clothes iron for the heat source. I like the pan of water because it keeps itself below scorching temperature... at least if it's made out of thin metal like mine.

After a bunch of fiddly sanding and scraping on the bridge today, I decided the fit was perfect enough that I'd go ahead and rub joint it after all. But first, I must clear away the finish for it. More or less like doing an inlay. Score around it:

And with a paper shield for the finish, route it out, very shallow.

Then scrape it smooth, because the router leaves a slightly rough surface.

Then stick bits of tape around it for visual reference when positioning the bridge (it's hard to see the pocket once it's wet with glue). Warm it up, slop glue on the bridge, set it in place, rub until stuck, and gently hold it down for a few minutes. Unfortunately I'm not 100% sure it worked. The initial grab of the glue happened sooner and more suddenly than expected, so I had to force it a bit to get it that last millimeter or so in place. But that may have messed up the suction, because I noticed one of the lower wing tips wasn't stuck all the way down. So I reheated that corner over a flame and held it down good and tight with one hand on the inside for support. Hopefully was hot enough to reactivate the glue. It's stuck down now, but that doesn't necessarily mean the joint is full strength.

And more bad news, I heated the soundboard a bit too hot, which caused all the tape bits to leave little marks in the finish. And the extra heat for that wing tip caused even more finish damage.

After a bit of micromesh sanding followed by a wipe of thin shellac, it's not terrible.

So that is the current state of things. I'm torn between pulling the bridge off and making cauls to clamp it with, or not because the removal process would probably tear up the finish even more. Though I could also take it as an opportunity to re-polish the whole top. I'll be keeping this one for myself, so it's not that big a deal if the bridge fails later. But it would be easier to make the inside caul now than it would after closing the box.

Here's a shot with the fingerboard set in place:

I have had problems with TB grabbing and not allowing any adjustment of gluing surfaces. Is that what happened to you? I'd like to find a glue that allows more working time.


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The strong grab is actually one of my favorite properties of hot hide glue, because it makes rub joints possible in the first place. Totally my fault on this one for not being more careful and making smaller motions to sneak up on it. You can feel just before it grabs, but unless you're within a millimeter or two of the destination at the time, it will be stuck before you get there.

Glue grab can also be a good thing when using clamps. Get it squeezed out and stuck in place before you put the clamps on, and it won't be as likely to slip and slide on you. Use it to your advantage rather than looking for a slower setting glue Position pins are another good way to get things in the right place and keep them there as you apply clamping pressure.

Dennis,

I think this is a very interesting project. It's going to be a piece of eye candy. I've pondered hardwood-topped guitars for a long time. I will be very interested to hear how your rosewood beauty sounds.

Patrick

Same here At this point I'm fairly certain it will at least be decent, but I'm really curious what the exact tonal character will be like.

Not much new progress to report. Just working on headstock binding:

The offcuts from the soundboard binding weren't quite long enough, so there's a scarf joint on each side near the top.

Then file/scrape level with the sides of the headstock, and with the face. I was hoping to do this without having to re-sand the whole face, but the curly pink ivory wasn't enjoying the scraper, so I used the file instead, which made some shallow scratches.

So since I'll be sanding it flat anyway, I figure that means I should do a headstock inlay after all, and level it at the same time. But the question is, what should the inlay be? A rose bud? A rose with stem? Some twisty thorny rose vines? A bird perched on top of the truss rod cover? On that note, I'm thinking more of the curly pink ivory for the truss rod cover.

After pondering on the headstock inlay for a couple days, I decided to go with the one that I'd drawn years ago when originally designing this guitar. It's moderately complex, but I was spending more time trying to come up with a simpler design than it would take to make this one in the first place.

Woods used are sipo and movingui for the vines, and bloodwood and pink ivory for the flowers. And yes, that is a toothbrush handle there Handy tool for getting wood chips out of the channels.

I routed everything at once, but then glued in stages so I could route through some of the crossover points rather than carefully fitting them all before gluing.

I also decided to add a little star and moon in the corners, because the top felt a little empty compared to the elaborate vines. After a bunch of sanding and scraping and rounding the bindings, here it is all nice and shiny with the truss rod cover and fingerboard in place.

The pores are unfilled and there are a few gaps around the inlays, but honestly I don't really care. It looks fine as is. So now that's out of the way, I can finally glue on the fingerboard

So here is the current state, with bridge pins fitted as well. The fingerboard will darken a lot, if not by intentional oiling, then by accumulating it from fingers. I'll probably do it intentionally so it doesn't end up all uneven a year from now.

Oh, and I've also been fiddling the finish around the bridge, with micromesh, French polishing, and wiping on thin shellac. It's a lot better now.

I'm almost sure I'm going to rename this to The Rose rather than Black Rose, since now I have red roses on the headstock too, and still no black ones. And the tap tones are promising enough that I'm pretty sure I will be building more rosewood tops, so I'll get to use the awesome name eventually

Next up, leveling and radiusing the fingerboard, finalizing the neck carving, and installing the frets.

Ok, after much sanding on the fingerboard, it now has a 16" radius. And with that done, I can do the final neck carving until it feels just right. Ended up taking quite a bit off.

Then take a coil of fret wire and grind down the barbs with the wonderful StewMac fret barber, until it fits into the slots with a moderate amount of force rather than all out hammering. Cut all the frets to approximate length, trim the tangs with my trusty tang nipper made from a sheet metal nibbling tool, and file down the remaining burr.

Then grind the ends to precise length on the XXC diamond stone that I use for everything, and give the ends a nice spherical shape. I discovered a great new way to do this, rubbing them in the StewMac offset diamond crowning file rather than on a flat diamond stone. Much less work. Still takes a while though, especially since I still have to go through 320, 400, 600, 1500 sandpaper grits afterward. Those are pretty quick individually, holding it in my fingers to make a concave surface like the file again, but 19 frets with 2 ends each x4 grits is still a lot of operations.

Then squeeze some hide glue in the slot, and force it down with a dull x-acto knife.

Wipe off the excess, and slop some water from the glue pot on it to prevent glue squeeze-out from gelling up and preventing the fret fully seating. Carefully position the fret, pound it in, and wipe away the excess glue/water mess.

Once they're all done, tape off the board and level with XF diamond stone. I maybe should use a longer leveling beam since this is only 8", but it seems to work well enough. Then use that offset diamond crowning file for its intended purpose It has a rather large radius, so you have to work each side of the fret separately like with a triangular file, but it gets the job done. Here you can kind of see "the line" in the center of the fret, which is the leveled surface, untouched by the crowning file.

Then sand through the 4 grits again, pull the tape, lightly scrape the board with a razor blade, and oil it. I'm trying out our sponsor Music Nomad's F-One oil, which I'm liking so far. Less scritchy feel than walnut oil, and it smells wonderful

And here's what I love about this fretting style, as opposed to filing the ends flush to the board edge after installing. I can leave just a bit of space between the fret end and board edge so they're guaranteed never to stick out in low humidity or snag fingernails when plucking over the fretboard.

Then paint the label on the back.

Finalize back and soundboard braces, occasionally spool clamping the back on to get an idea of the box tap. The weight of the clamps makes the frequencies lower than they will be, but it still works to see how the top and back interact. This is the final top bracing:

This terrible back wood had a few more hairline cracks that I patched using along-the-grain inlaid strips like I did in an earlier post. Then in preparation for closing, I heated it to dry it out and it cracked beside those strips. I was afraid I'd totaled it, but I decided to give it one more chance and glued cross grain reinforcements over the cracks this time, and heated it again. It didn't crack any more, so I went ahead and glued it on. Still fairly likely that I'll have to completely redo the back/sides on this thing in a few years. But first I need to see how it sounds, whether it's worth redoing... the spool clamp tap sounds very promising, but you never know for sure until you actually get strings on it.

The neck angle is set while clamping. This one was just about perfect without the back on, so I didn't have to crank it one way or the other. Just try to get the clamps on without moving it. I use Old Brown glue for box closing, because I need a lot of open time to get all those clamps on. Then heat it over a fire on the kitchen stove for a while to maybe get a little more squeeze-out, though it's probably not necessary.

Almost done! Next up is tuners and strings... then if nothing bad happens, I'll trim the back overhang and get started polishing the back/sides.

Dennis , I say this again . You are an extremely talented guy and your work never ceases to impress me ! Fantastic Tutorial on this build !

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Time to resurrect this thread again! The guitar still isn't completely finished yet, but I've been doing some more work on it lately.

After the initial string-up over a year ago, nothing bad happened, but the tone wasn't anything special. About like an average factory guitar. Not enough to declare victory in my rosewood top quest yet I decided to give it some time to settle in before trimming the overhang incase I wanted to open it up again, and it went on the back burner while I worked on other things.

Over the winter, the back gained many cracks, and a few in the sides as well. I filled them with glue and sawdust, but I may have to rebuild it with a different back/side set if it happens again next winter. No problems from swelling in high humidity though, so I'm still not 100% sure that flatsawn ebony can't be tamed by bracing dry for low humidity tolerance and with large brace glue area for high humidity tolerance. I may just not have dried it enough.

The tone never really changed, and I measured the bridge rotation under tension and got basically nothing, so I decided it was just too darn stiff. I peeled the back off to carve on the braces some more and glue cleats over those filled cracks. Even after removing a significant amount of bracing, it still measured less than 1 degree of bridge rotation, so I opened it up it again. Here's the final bracing:

Everyone says lattice bracing is stiffer than you'd think, and now I believe them. Those small braces are about 1/8" tall, and the X is about 1/2" max (excluding the cap), down to 5/16" at the bridge and 1/4" below that. Hard to believe a .070" thick soundboard can survive with so little bracing, but the curvature looks good, and measured bridge rotation is right about 2 degrees, so apparently it can.

It's much louder now. Excellent bass, but the trebles have that funky hollow sound that all my steel string guitars seem to have to some degree. It was there even when it was super stiff, but now that the overall sound is louder, the funk is more audible as well.

Here's a recording of the open high E, which is always the worst for making this hollow sound. The first and last plucks, especially. Plucking the string in certain places suppresses it, as you can hear, but is impractical while actually playing.
https://soundcloud.com/user-587599889/e-1

After doing a bunch of frequency analysis, I think I've finally figured out that the funky sound comes from excessively strong overtones, resulting from my soundboxes being too lively in the 500Hz+ range. Good for nylon strings, but apparently not for steels.

So the question for the next rosewood top is... what can I do different to tame the highs? I thought the relatively high ~300 gram soundboard mass (including bridge and everything) would already have done it, yet this guitar has the most 500-2000Hz power of any that I've built... including Galaxy, which is about 230g total soundboard mass, and also built out of low damping woods. It does have strong overtones as well, but not excessive like this one.

So what's the difference? Size, for one thing. Galaxy is 14" lower bout, this is 15". But again, that seems like it would make Galaxy more high frequency focused. Soundboard thickness is the next most obvious difference. Galaxy gets most of its stiffness from the soundboard itself, whereas this one gets most of its stiffness from the lattice bracing. But with the braces all notched together so there are no major flex points, they should be functionally very similar. The close spacing of the braces should also prevent the areas of thin wood inbetween from vibrating independently. And if the entire east/west quadrants vibrating independently is a problem, then Galaxy should have it too, since it has no finger braces. Damping out the back and sides doesn't make much difference to that high E either.

Tuning down to DADGAD does sound better, though. Not so much high frequency power coming from the strings in the first place. So for that, I can definitely call it a success.

Here's a quick sound clip fiddling around in standard tuning. I need to record some DADGAD as well.
https://soundcloud.com/user-587599889/rosewood-top-guitar

And some pictures. The back is still a mess, but as long as you don't look at that, it's quite lovely

Very cool post. Love your courage in routing those rosettes and headstock decoration.

I am also very impressed with the sound clip. From the rosewood top, and the pix of the bracing pattern I would have assumed that it would be extremely tight, but your recording sounds well balanced and resonant.

Great job!