I acquired this guitar from my pastor at church and put it into the someday pile. That day has arrived.

My brother, Daren, plays in the worship band at his church and while talking to him one day, I mentioned this guitar. He told me that he would love to have a 'Dan Savage' guitar and that the super-shallow bowl appealed to him for a stage guitar.

He's visitiing for the holidays, so as a fun project, we decided to pull the tops off this guitar and the 1612-4, which is also my next project, which will be re-topped in tandem with this one.

Here's what the guitar looked like when I got it. To put it bluntly, it was worn out. The top was sunken, the bridge had been shaved, as had even the saddle. So, the plan was to pull the neck, then pull the top.

This guitar will be getting a torrefied Adi spruce top and braces. Since most of this work is stuff you've alread seen before, I'm only going to post highlights of stuff I'm doing that I haven't done before.

I'm going to try a couple of new things on this guitar. I'm going to try to add abalone purfling to the body a la the Custom Legend. It'll be getting a walnut carved CL bridge.

I'm also going to try making my own real abalone CL rosette. When it's done it'll be more like a Custom Ultra. Here's a couple of pics that shows how these are built.

Neck is off.

As is the top.

The neck uses a dovetail joint. Rather than convert this to a bolt-on neck, we'll be leaving this as a glue-on neck. I'll clean up the neck and body block, shim it out to where it needs to be, then glue it back on once the guitar top is finished.

So, I got an unfinished rosette from the MS to use for my own Custom Legend-style rosette.

I ordered some shell feathers from the Duke of Pearl. These are shavings of shell that are ~.005" thick. Each feather is about 1-1/4" x 5". I ordered several different varieties because I didn't know which would look best.

The top row is green abalone and the bottom row is red abalone.

Here's some mother of pearl feathers.

And a red abalone laminated sheet.

Here's a close-up of the green abalone showing the rippling in the figuring. These are really pretty, but the red abalone will look best.

Here's a close-up showing figuring of the red abalone.

And, how it'll look when behind the rosette.

Since Daren is only going to be here for a few more days I thought I'd let him pick out and cut the red abalone pieces for his rosette. Once they're cut and numbered I'll glue them into the rosette later on.

I used the above pics from TJR to create a template in CAD for the sections of abalone used in the rosette. This printed version on the right was used to verify the finished size.

The pieces on the left are various attempts to cut the shell feathers. The shell is very thin, about .004", so it's very delicate. Cutting with scissors is unpredictable. Cutting with an Xacto blade is also unpredictable because of how hard and brittle the shell is. The closest thing to success was to score the outline with a sharp Xacto, then breaking it along the score like thin glass. This worked, but was tedious and time-consuming. Even then, the shell was delicate and breaks easy.

Here's the template printed onto a transparency. The tracing template will be placed over the shell to find the exact orientation of the shell as it's placed around the rosette.

Here's the tracing template.

Here's the solution for cutting out the sections of shell. We stuck clear shipping tape to the back of the shell before tracing and cutting. Now the pieces can be cut with scissors and don't split or crack. We'll just leave the tape on the back of the shell permanently.

Here's how they'll look in place.

Yay, I can post here, now! Thanks Damon!

As Dan wrote, before I left for home, we worked on the rosette pieces based on what I thought would look good. It didn't. It ended up looking more like mother of pearl than abalone. We decided the the green abalone will look better than the red abalone.

In honor of the randomness of the universe and MS, Dan's going to cut the new pieces for the rosette based on space considerations rather than artistic interpretation.

Daren

Here's the pics of the rosette pieces. Below is the patterns from the template for the rosette sections traced onto the red ab.

And the first few pieces. Unfortunately, we chose to trace the pattern onto the front side of the shell using a Sharpee permanent marker. This caused two problems. First, it caused a build-up of ink on the underside of the template that caused the template to stick to the shell. It also bled under the template something fierce. It was also a pain to clean off the shell and on most parts it left a shadow of the ink. Cleaning off the ink made the task of cutting out the pieces long and laborious.

Here's what the final red ab pieces look like when in place. This is actually a mirror-image of what the finished rosette would look like.

Because of how thin the shell feathers are, these pieces are pretty translucent and pick up whatever color is behind them. The back of the rosette will get sprayed with flat black spray paint once the shell pieces are glued into place. This will darken them a little bit more than what the above photo shows.

We thought that the plain red ab looked too much like mother of pearl, so we decided to try the figured parts of the green ab, instead.

Here's the finished pieces of green ab sitting on the rosette. This is a mirror-image of how it will look. Again, once it's sprayed with black it will darken a little bit. It definitely doesn't look like MOP.

Instead of using a marker to trace the template, I used a mechanical pencil and that worked a lot better. It stayed on when being handled and the marks can be erased with the pencile eraser leaving no marks. But, the line is so thin that most of the time it gets cut away leaving no trace behind. This made the task of cutting out the pieces a lot easier and faster.

When we cut out the red ab pieces, we did so in a two-step process. The first step was to rough-cut all the pieces at once, then do a final fitting to the rosette. For the green ab pices I cut them to fit the rosette in one piece at a time instead of cutting out all the pieces. The accuracy of the thin pencil line vs. the thick, bleeding marker line is what made this possible.

"The factory used segments of real abalone first on the Custom Legend rosettes. Then, other guitars, such as the Collector Series got them. "

When Ovation was putting out thousands of guitars...was the process of cutting abalone done by a machine? What a tedious and meticulous process this would be. I can now see the argument for decals.

If they're sized correctly, and supplied to the factory in bulk, it wouldn't be that much trouble to assemble these rosettes in a production environment. Having to cut them by hand is the time-consuming part. Still, abalonoid is cheaper and easier than segments of abalone. Less breakage and waste, too.

I don't think they ever did the rosette with real MOP. I bought some when I ordered the abalone because I thought it would be interesting to see a real MOP rosette.

Daren