The Gouzouki Project - Head Overlay

I’m using a rosewood veneer which arrives fairly rough sawn.

My first attempt at reducing this down to thickness was to use the thicknesser (doesn't sound unreasonable, does it?) The only problem was that the minimum length the thicknesser can deal with is about 300mm and the rosewood blank was only about 200mm. So I developed a cunning plan to use double-sided tape to hold the blank onto a longer piece of softwood. This went catastrophically wrong! The thicknesser tore the blank from the softwood and spat it out the end, after comprehensively mashing it! As can be seen below ...

Fortunately, there was enough left undamaged and I then resorted to the belt sander to bring it down to the required thickness and smoothness. These photos show before and after sanding.

Then I temporarily clamped it in place so I could get the nicest grain alignment before trimming roughly to size. The end of the veneer that will rest against the nut needs to be sanded to an angle so using a square and adjustable angle let me find the right angle to set the sanding table at.

I only just had enough left after the trashing by the thicknesser!

Glueing and clamping, using a caul of scrap wood to spread the load across the whole area.

A quick tidy up on the belt sander after glueing, and then I extended the truss rod access channel using a round file - starting to look a bit decorative.