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Here are a few pics of my process for making rosette tiles. The pics here are a close replica to the tiles on my Schramm guitar which has a copy of the 1937 Hauser rosette. Sorry if these pics take awhile to load. Lance--feel free to delete if this is hogging up too much bandwidth.



veneer strips thicknessed to .025"



veneer strips glued together to form logs



finished logs



.025" strips cut off the sides of the logs



cut strips from the glued log



cut strips glued together to form final log



final log will have an end-grain with the mosaic tile design



2mm tiles are cut from the final log



tiles will be inlayed in rosette like this



closeup of Hauser rosette

Beautiful! This is the kind of stuff I was refering to in my dream, design, build, and share post.

Thank you John. Very timely for me. I'm trying to piece together my first rosette right now.

I agree. I had no idea how you would go about this process. John, the pictures make all the difference. I'm sure Lance won't mind at all. This needs to be expanded and go in the OLF library. Thanks.

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Don Atwood
Arlington, VA

John,

Cool! Thanks for the explanation and pictures. Keep the pictures of the process coming, it is very interesting to see how it works.

Jeff

John,
On the final construction picture, where you are slicing off the tile, I'm not clear on how you keep those little guys from falling down the "throat" on your bandsaw when they slice off. Or do you just pick them up at the bottom of the saw?

Nice looking work by the way!

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From Nacogdoches...the oldest town in Texas.

http://www.stephenkinnaird.com

You guessed it, right now I'm digging the tiles out from falling through the saw. The ideal way would be to get a very thin kerf blade for my table saw, and then construct a table-saw throat plate, so only a small portion of the blade is exposed. Once I get settled out in Indiana, that will be added to my list of projects for sure.

Cheers!

John

Would it be possible to build some sort of jig for slicing the tiles without losing them, something of a zero clearance throat for the bandsaw with a built in fence like so?


Or would that be a really bad idea given the nature the thin blade involved with a bandsaw? Maybe have the fence stop right after the blade so that each successive cut pushes the peice before it to safety, or cut a hole in it and hook up a dirt devil to scoop away the peices before they fall in

Thanks for sharing your work btw. What I've read led me to believe that you pretty much cut the veneer into tiny little strips, then glue the strips into one row, then the rows into columns. This looks a lot easier.

Grab some scrap from a headplate, put it up against the fence, and saw half way through it. Then saw your tiles on top of that since the hole is now gone, and you won't have to dig them out of the bandsaw.

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Instagram: @jfrenchluthier
Web: https://www.jfrenchguitars.com/

Very interesting Reading Thanks John

i haven't made a rosette in a long time but i think it should be mentioned that after the first step of   artistially rendering your rosette to eatablish the general appearance, the next is to draw your tile pattern in colour. graph paper is the preferred drawing surface. i/4" grid works well to rough it, but metric 1mm grid is better for final sizing and layout drawing.

one used to be able to buy veneer sticks in a huge array of colours for laying up the logs if you did not feel like slicing up veneer.crazymanmichael38521.6764583333

You can still get the sticks, from LMI for one.

What's the easiest way to glue the veneer sticks? I wouldn't guess you'd use epoxy like the veneers. Do you just wick CA into the sticks? The sticks would be nice, but they sure cost a lot more. For an 8x8 tile, that would be 64 sticks which would be approx. $35.00 per rosette, not including all the other veneer rope and purfling required. I'd say the veneers are less than $2.00 per rosette, but the labor cost is much higher!   

John