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Here's what I was talking about. The orange from the coco has bled into the surrounding shellac, it is not in the wood. I used shellac to seal the spruce then CA'd the rosette followed by egg white sizing. Then brushed on shellac. Looks like the egg white did not adequately seal the cocobolo. I've already found, as some have said here, that wiping on the shellac works much better. You can get a thinner, more even coat. Tomorrow I will try to wipe on multiple coats of shellac until the pad is clean. If I can't get that to work then I'll probably try epoxy.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Nice looking rosette!!

Once you solve the bleeding issue - you'll have a fine looking guitar there!

Steve I had that very same problem with a bloodwood rosette on my first guitar. Cotton pickin thing bled all over EVERTHING.

I solved it by using a 2lb cut of shellac - dipped a Q-tip in it - and using a rolling motion (by that I mean that I rotated the head of the Q-tip so that a fresh clean surface was in contact with the rosette/top at all times) I applied the shellac making sure I didn't cross any of the maple purf lines. It worked perfectly. I let it dry over night before I applied anything else...which was more shellac to the whole top. Solved my problem.

Chris

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There is no difference between the man that thinks he can....and the man that thinks he cannot.

I got a little more time to work on it and tried to use a cloth with a bit of shellac on it to go round just the coco part of the rosette as Alexandru and Burton recommended. It worked much better but I still got a bit outside of the lines; I have pretty big fingers. I'll try Chris' idea with the q-tip tomorrow.

I did get a big bottle of grain alcohol and mixed up some more shellac so I don't have to worry about poisoning myself anymore. Plus there are other uses

Hey Corky, thanks for the encouragement - always good at times like this.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

So far I tried the rolling q-tip (I think my rosette is too narrow) and ended up using my finger and a folded up cloth dipped in a bit of shellac; just had to be real careful and used a fresh part of the cloth each time I put it on the rosette. I probably have 4 or 5 coats on and I think it will be just fine.

I also tried some CA on scrap and it seemed to work very well. I will probably do this in the future.

I've been avoiding spraying since I had several nasty lung infections (chemical pneumonia?) from spraying 2 part epoxy paint on large pieces of commercial dive equipment. This was a long time ago and even though I used a full face mask with air supply I suspect our protective gear and, no doubt, our procedures could have been better.

So all of this is probably overkill now as I've decided to spray the shellac coats on the rest of the guitar with a jamb gun. Spraying just does too nice of a job. Of course the learning part is always very valuable.

Thanks everyone, hopefully this one will be complete in another month or so. I'm itching to start on the next ones.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Sprayed a couple of coats of shellac - no bleeding Onward to the next learning opportunity.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

looks great Steve!!!

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Burton
http://www.legeytinstruments.com
Brookline, MA.