Hi All
I have been using a dental burr (free from my dentist) to cut my rosette channels and thought I would test it against an $8 bit bought from a US supplier. I cut 2 rings in some scrap (scrap as in I screwed up a nice sound board awhile ago) : 1 with each bit. In the pictures below the inner channel was cut with the dental burr and the outer with the $8 bit. I see some fuzziness with the inner that I don't see with the outer so I am probably leaning to the $8 bit in the future. While I was cutting the channels I realized that I could do another test at the same time. There have been some posts on the forum about Chinese purfling. I do have some and so I thought I would inlay it in one of the channels and then inlay a US bought product in the other. See if I could see much difference in the two: fit, ease of bending etc. I am not recommending anything here just passing on the results.
I have spent my entire working life as a small manufacturer of some great American products and am all for the American worker, Baseball and Apple pie. The products are both b/w/b purfling and are within .001" in width of each other. Length and height are very close to each other as well. One cost 30 cents each including shipping and the other is $3.00 each plus shipping. There is a difference in color of the white section which is a good thing as I wouldn't want to discover that my American supplier is buying 30 cent purfling from China and selling it to me for $3.00. The Chinese purfling is a little more brittle so that you have to be more careful in bending. The American sold product bends more easily with less chance of splitting. Let me know if you can see a difference. Again I am not recommending anything. I still haven't made up my mind whether the savings is worth it and don't have enough experience with it to know if it will last. And honestly I am not a Communist.
![[uncle]](./images/smilies/surrenderflagqv6.gif "Uncle")
And I know that some of you would not put a Chinese made product on your custom guitar and I respect that. - Mike Attachment:
IMG_3163.JPG
Attachment:
IMG_3164.JPG
