So I woke up this morning to a great New Year surprise from Mike - more progress pics!
Here is Mike's description of what he's done:
"The headstock bass side is the black coco, the treble side is the African Milkwood. For the treble side I wanted to really capture a natural feel and color and to balance the colors in the wedge. I also wanted it to have some movement and what I did was take several pieces of the milkwood and stack them up and free form bandsawed out the wave pattern. Then I cleaned up the matching edges and glued another thin line of milkwood in between. The Milkwood pcs were randomly cut and mixed up so that the flame, grain and color should almost have the appearance of pearl, meaning from different angles the color and flame will look different from the pieces right next to it. I decided to bind the headstock in African Blackwood and have it fade to sap and then back. This is also featured in the thin veneer line that seperates the two halves of the headstock.
The rosette features the same design as the headstock. I added a piece of the turquoise that will be in the purflings to match. Originally the colored wedge pc was to be smaller than what I ended up doing but it is hard to get allot of the design and different woods into a 1/2"x1/4"! So I expanded it to get more of this and I think it turned out great!
The round rosette cutoff you see pictured will be used for the volute veneer.
Since the designs are drawn and assembled in a way to make it feel more organic, cutting the wedges and trying to keep the designs centered was difficult, so the patterns are not perfectly centered. To me this just adds more character it it and really makes it show the amount of handwork involved even though the pieces were originally cut on the cnc.
Anyway I think overall the design is really coming together and the last step will to see if the spalted maple binding is still the best choice. I will wait until the box is assembled to figure that out.
Things will slow down a bit in January until after the NAMM show and then the box and neck will be assembled"
The Rosette:
