It’s been a while since I posted. I had a few health issues that meant I had to take a month off, but I’m back at it now, and have been working on the headstock, neck and neck joint.
One of the challenging parts has been the headstock finial.
The Perry Salter headstock has a distinctive ending in a finial instead of a scroll. These finials have various designs:
Heart:
Tortoiseshell:
Parquetry:
I like the last one best, and it is also the one on the LM1178 instrument in the National Museum, Dublin. The materials look like Mother of Pearl, Jade and Ebony in the original. I haven’t done any parquetry before, especially not in tricky materials, so I tried a practice in wood before.
Previously I’ve done marquetry in the “all-in-one” style before. This means stacking up layers of material and cutting out all the pieces at once, leaving small gaps where the saw has been. The other approach - “piece by piece” - is much more work but you can ensure there are no gaps.
I tried the all-in-one approach for my test piece, thinking maybe I could get rid of the gaps and just shrink the whole piece a little. Unfortunately this ended up quite wonky:
As a result, I decided to do the “real” one as piece-by-piece.
I couldn’t find a suitable supply of cut jade, so I used a combination of Black Abalone (BA) and Mother of Pearl (MOP). One lesson I learnt from the practice was that it is easier to manage the kite shapes that are made from opposing triangles. As a result I glued the MOP and BA pieces together and then cut out the kite shapes:
Laying out pieces in progress:
I then slowly filed down the pieces to remove gaps and get the design to fit to the template:
Nearly complete:
Adding a border:
And finally, in place on the headstock:
Next time, I’ll explain the fitting of the tuners to the headstock and what I learnt about them on the way.