Lately I’ve been making rings and the X-carve has been great for precision sizing and thickness’s. I thought I’d share my latest and most complex ring build. It will be a guitar fretboard when finished with all the trimmings. I started making a sketch and then building the ring with quarter sawn maple for the core and beautiful rosewood for the outer ring. All the other materials are pointed out in the sketch. Going slow with it, got the rig made and the lines engraved. Next step is to drill the holes for the Mother of pearl dots. Just hope it looks as good as it does in my head 
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Your project is inspiring. Can’t wait to see the finished product. Very nice craftsmanship.
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THAT is friggin cool.
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Ok Brian, you have exceeded the whole guitar art thing by millions of miles with this one! Could you please share the process, please, please please? Sooooooooo Cool!!!
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Wow, you knocked it out of the park with this. Thank you for sharing.
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Ok Brian, you have exceeded the whole guitar art thing by millions of miles with this one! Could you please share the process, please, please please? Sooooooooo Cool!!!
Ditto! Nice job! I too am curious as to how you made it.
Jeff
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Hey Jeff,
Making the ring part is pretty straight fwd, I started with a 8mm thick piece of Brazilian Rosewood and cut the ring out on the x-carve to the size of the ring needed; in this case a size 11. I made it slightly larger by the size of the Maple veneer I used for the inner band. The wood and veneer are then stabilized with industrial strength thin CA glue. If possible you would want to use a wood that was resin stabilized, but I didn’t have it available.
Next comes the layout engraving, at this point the rest of the project is done by hand. If you look at the second photo in the post, I take small jewelry files and file out the lines needed for the frets and the strings. I then take a mini drill press
And a small vice and drill small holes in every other fret for the mother of pearl inlays. Those consist of small mother of pearl flakes and CA glue. The copper is from copper wire and is cut, glued, and filed into place and the same with the guitar strings. Of course there is a ton of sanding and shaping using grits from 120 up to the high micro mesh thousands. I use a uv cured resin to coat the ring and give it a nice shine as well as protect the ring from water and the elements.
It takes a lot of practice, best to start with plain wood rings and add something different each time. If you look at my site brkncreative.com you’ll see I started with a lot of plain wood rings and slowly started adding some other techniques just recently. Hope this helps, feel free to ask any questions.
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