Where to get good veneers?

[Lee]

Pete, if you would clarify the current state of the fingerboard as unslotted or with frets removed from an existing slotted board it could help. Have in mind that with any inlay you can carve the pocket to suit the inlay, or cut the inlay to suit the pocket.

[Kim]

I'm looking for the sort of stuff I could use for fret markers on a fretless bass.

That doesn't sound like a lot of material. You could take any piece of wood, cut some sticks and take the down with a handplane and scraper to almost any thickness you wish. This is quicker than you might believe. A veneer thicknesser might help but is not really necessary for just one or two meters of veneer strip.

Veneer-thicknesser-2012_D70_4907-1.jpg

Of course you also can use a drumsander as Allen already mentioned.

Wow thanks guys. Some great ideas.

Charangohabsburg, can you tell me more about the process? How do you keep the little bits of wood still? Double sided tape? I don't have a drum sander.

Yes Markus is quite famous for them around these parts.

[slowlearner]

Pete, if you would clarify the current state of the fingerboard as unslotted or with frets removed from an existing slotted board it could help. Have in mind that with any inlay you can carve the pocket to suit the inlay, or cut the inlay to suit the pocket.

Currently unslotted (I was gonna say virgin but that sounded wrong for some reason). Fresh build. I know I can use whatever and cut to suit, but realistically, a fret saw with depth gauge is gonna give me the best consistency slot wise. Also, I only want a very thin marker so veneer is the go. Specifically, I want to thin down some Vic ash for the job.

I'm entering this build in a comp, so I need to keep it to the 3 timbers I already have...
http://www.talkbass.com/forum/f57/3-woo ... rs-887437/

[charangohabsburg]

Charangohabsburg, can you tell me more about the process? How do you keep the little bits of wood still? Double sided tape? I don't have a drum sander.

• When the piece is long enough I simply clamp it to the bench and skew the plane to get closer to the clamp when starting the stroke. After every few plane strokes I flip the piece over (front to back) to plane down also the piece that was close to the clamp and under it.
  
  When using a hand scraper I most often don't flip the piece over but cut off the part which was under the clamp when I am done.
• Short pieces are trickier. In these cases I make a temporary bench hook gluing down (with water soluble glue, I prefer fish glue) a stop that I plane down to a bit thinner that I want to go with the working piece. Then I use a jack plane, the bigger the better. This allows me to hold down the whole working piece with the part of the plane's sole in front of the blade, eliminating the danger that the wood could buckle when pushing the plane. Also, the longer the plane the easier it will be to hold it parallel to the bench and not creating a wedge.
  
  I only once had to scrape a short (10mm) piece of veneer, and I simply glued it to a board (fish glue) and soaked it with a wet rag to release when done. With double sided tape you might have a major problem to release the veneer without damaging it, and then you had to get rid of the glue residues the tape left on the wood.
• The veneer thicknesser I showed only works with reasonable long strips. Just pull through the strip holding it with pliers and taking shallow passes. The blade angle of my model is designed to use it with a turned hook, and the blade is annealed, e.g. is not as hard as a normal plane blade. You can't turn a hook on a normal plane blade. If you want to use a blade without a turned hook the angle had to be different. Today I most probably would use just a normal plane blade and experiment with the angle. I also maybe would not go again with a modified plane but just with a blade clamped/screwed to a block of wood.

[slowlearner]

cool. thanks. that makes sense. I really gotta sharpen all my blades anyhow. Good excuse to pull them apart and try something.

I've got a stack of vic ash dowel. that would be perfect for this sort of thing, right?

[charangohabsburg]

Never heard of vic ash. But if it is wood it will be just fine I guess!

[slowlearner]

Victorian ash. Australian native timber

[Mike Thomas]

Same Eucalypt species as Tassie oak.

[charangohabsburg]

Thanks Pete and Mike.
As long as it is not cigarette ash...

I confess that I am a woodnames-aholic!

[Jules93]

I’ve been looking on eBay and market place
There’s some there,
On my next guitar I want to make a wood ring rosette or a radial rosette (not buy one)
As far as solid ring I can’t find any veneers that are at least 1mm thick
I don’t have a machine shop so I can’t thickness them unless I just use a hand plane on thicker stock till I get to that thickness.
Or will a 0.5 or 0.6mm be ok for a rosette if not could I make a backer board or even cut the veneer in half and and ply it?

[Mark McLean]

Hi Jules
It is true that using a really thin veneer for a rosette is a challenge because you are likely to sand through it as you try to level it after inlaying in the soundboard. You could glue a number of layers of the same veneer together to make a thicker piece. Or glue a single thin sheet on a backing substrate and then inlay it slightly below the level of the soundboard and carefully sand the soundboard down to it.

One design that I have liked making is based on the "stained glass" rosettes that Jason Kostal often does. It is a bit time consuming, but not difficult . Looks like this (versions by JK, Rod True, and one of mine below) - you can come up with lots of variations. Just glue strips or blocks together in a mosaic and place accent strips between each one. I glue up a square mosaic on a flat board (a cheap plastic cutting board; glue doesn't stick to it) and then sand it flat and cut out a rosette using a circle cutter. Jason Kostal uses a light coloured timber like maple and stains them a variety of colours before making the mosaic. Mine was just a bunch of different timbers from the scraps drawer:

jason kostal.png (393.21 KiB) Viewed 1038 times

[kiwigeo]

Nice Kostal inspired rosettes there Mark.

I did a similar rosette on a build I did for late ANZLF member Kym Bell. The wood is thin pieces of a Coobah burl and between them is black purfling.

[Taffy Evans]

Hi Jules, do you have a drill press? If so, I could show you a small-thickness sander I built using a drill press some time ago. You might be able to get a local cabinet shop to machine stock down close to what you need, then do the final thickness yourself.
Taff

[Jules93]

As a response to those couple of responses
Those Rossette’s absolutely fantastic, stunning
Work if anything I might just do that looks awesome and unique
Yeah some workspace has opened up for next year so I can finally finish my first guitar,
10 years in the making
(bit of a story mixed circumstances)
There was a drill press in the corner.
I’ve seen some little sanding drums and safe t planer from stew Mac so when the funds come in that might be worth a purchase

[Taffy Evans]

Hi Jules, if you are in the USA it might be good to shop at Stewmacs, but here in Australia, I bought my Safe T planer around 25 -thirty years ago. It would be much cheaper I would think.
Taff