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Old 06-30-2020, 07:27 AM
Quickstep192 Quickstep192 is offline
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Default Breaking abalone into curves

I've read several things where people talk about breaking abalone strips to make them confirm with curves. Just how does this work? Doesn't it leave gaps? I just can't envision this. Can someone school me a little?
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Old 06-30-2020, 07:58 AM
charles Tauber charles Tauber is offline
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A video is worth a lot of words....

Thanks to Robbie O'Brien:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_23la54KUp8
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Old 06-30-2020, 12:28 PM
redir redir is offline
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Don't worry about the cracking. The gaps will be invisible unless while cracking it a piece chips away which happens from time to time. But a nice clean break in fact makes it look better. The first guitar I ever did this with I purchased curved abalone to match the rosette radius and also to be used for the purfling. Barely any of it cracked so the final result I could more clearly see each indifidual one inch long abalone piece butted up against the one before it. It's not terrible or anything but when you crack it, it creates a randomness to those joint lines and overall looks a lot better.

Actually the very first time I did this I used Zipflez which truly is an awesome product but it's expensive and frankly inlaying it the old school way is not at all difficult and I do believe the result even looks better. But ZipFlex is very easy to use too.
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