During the building of this guitar I’ve been using spare moments to work on a couple of inlays for the headstock and neck. The song Blackbird has a special meaning in my family so I thought it would be nice to incorporate a black bird somewhere on the guitar. Phil, the course tutor, suggested Black Tahiti Pearl, a beautiful, irridescent black mother-of-pearl material, and I decided to have a go at inlaying a black bird design into the headstock. I tried to find a pic of a blackbird in flight on the web but couldn’t find anything suitable (although there are many SR-71 Blackbird spyplane pics!) In the end the design I used just popped into my head one morning (although I suspect Rose put it there - she was the arty one....)
First, I tried cutting out a few test pieces with some scrap white mother-of-pearl:
Next, I cut out my paper full-size design and fastened it to a Tahiti Pearl blank with double sided tape. Then, with a jeweller’s ‘piercing’ saw I carefully cut out the full size bird. Care was needed here - large pieces of Black Tahiti Pearl aren’t cheap!
Then a few trial runs at the actual inlaying process, first with a piece of scrap mahogany, then an ebony blank:
Part 20 - Inlays
Finally, with my heart in my mouth, the real thing - first knifing the design into the ebony headstock veneer with a scalpel, then routing out the basic shape with a Dremel and then finishing with a fine chisel, down to the layer of holly under the ebony veneer:
Making An Acoustic Guitar - Page 29
