Owl Shaped Guitar Soundhole Cover

I inherited a nice guitar from my friend. The guitar was in bad condition so at first I must had to clean and restorate it. It was a slow process and an interesting journey since I never had a guitar before.

I've documented this whole process on my Google Plus wall and collected those articles on Pinterest: Cremona guitar cleaning and restorating Each picture (are in reverse order) links back to an article. These articles are written in Hungarian language, but You can use the translate button on GPlus.

Now the Cremona - old Czech guitar manufacturer - is in good health, and I wanted to make her something nice and interesting. Maybe a decorative soundhole cover? I saw many nice, e.g. the laser cutted Lute Hole and many hand carved ones. I noticed those are all a „simple" round shape. And thats where the fun begun: I wanted something different.

So I wanted something out of circle. I imagined a head, e.g. cat, dragon or owl. Then I found the art of Jessica Stokes and a wonderful, detailed owl head. Here is the awesome original illustration. (Credit: Jessica Rose Anne http://whatjessdrew.blogspot.hu/)

As You can see it's mind blowingly detailed, too detailed to cut those tiny lines with fretsaw, so I must had to simplify it first to work with it. The final plan is still a nice owl head.

At first I wanted to start with birch, pine laminate, but finally I took a try with a crap fruit box. Not bad at all, but I will make another one from a better piece.

In this project You will work with tiny holes and gaps, so there are some essential tool:

• various sandpapers
• fret saw
• small drill bits (1-1,5mm)
• needle files
• matchsticks
• soldering iron or pyrography tool
• nail polishing sticks
• Olfa cutting knife

I found that the fret saw is huge for this project so I dissected it and used the handle of it only. I added support for the blade on the opposite side with nail. It was slow but accurate enough.

(I tried to make a smaller fret saw frame out of bike brake frame, but it failed since it was impossible to tension the blade enough.)

Another improvement is a grinded needle file, but it was still huge. So I made tiny files out of thinned matchsticks with superglued sandpaper on it. This way You can have any fineness You want with the right grit sandpaper.

Third thing is a small chisel grinded from precision screwdriver.

Finally let me mention a must have helping hand. My cat assisted the whole soundhole project actively. Note the cats loves to lie upon workpieces...

For working with fret saw You need drill small holes to insert the blade. At some areas the 1.5mm drill bit was too huge so here came the 0.6mm engraving bit that worked perfectly in this soft wood laminate.

This was the slowest process with my ultra lightened saw. An early stage a started to drill smaller holes to the corners of the cutting lines. This helped to change direction easier with the blade.

The arc on the bottom of the fretboard needed extra alignment to fit perfectly. The sidewall is not vertical here it has a skewed side.

Finally apply some pyrography to the designed areas then fine polish it. Will apply a touch of citrone oil and a small rubberfoam piece to the underside to hold it in place.

So that was an attempt with crapwood. It's time to select some nicer one to work with although I'm happy with this one too. :)

You can see more photos and articles about the whole process on my Google Plus profile. It's not written in English, but You can use the translate button. My soundholecover project on GPlus.