Okay, so this isn't exactly a bullet hole, but that's what our customer calls it, so that's what we're calling it.

The guitar is a very nice late '60s vintage dreadnought, with an ugly hole on the top side of the soundhole.  This kind of repair isn't going to be invisible, but these kinds of problems seem to get bigger over time, so he brought it in to get it fixed.

Here's the guitar, with the "bullet hole" on the left side.

 

First, we trace the hole, in order to make a new piece the right shape and size.

 

We found a nice piece of scrap sitka spruce with grain that pretty closely matches this guitar--in a soundhole cutout.

 

we cut out the tracing, glued it to the scrap spruce, and now use a jeweler's saw to cut out the pattern, just like doing an inlay.

 

Now, we file the edges to get them to fit.

 

Here's the piece, in the hole.  Now, we have a different issue to resolve...the hole is right in the middle of a piece of the rosette.  We have to try and fit an inlay into our inlaid piece, to match the rosette.  We're estimating that the black strip is about .020" thick. 

 

We don't have a strip of black material that will work, but we have some b/w/b wood purfling that we can cut to match.  Here we take a sharp chisel and cut one of the black strips away from the b/w/b piece.

 

Here is a good shot of the b/w/b piece being cut.

 

In this photo, we're using the sharp edge of the chisel to scrape away the white layer, and clean up our black strip.

 

Now, with the black strip ready, we have to cut the slot for our black strip.  We are using a circle cutter--which we use to cut rosette slots.  We double-stick-tape down the spruce piece, in proper position to cut our new rosette strip.

 

Here, we find a very tiny bit for our dremel, and route the slot.

 

Here's the piece, with the inlaid rosette patch.  It fits pretty well.  Now, you can still see a small remaining piece of "bullet hole".  We have to fill this also.

 

Here, we cut a small strip to inlay into our remaining hole.

 

The piece fits well, and in addition to the spruce piece, we have to cut another very small piece of black strip to put at the edge of the hole.

 

There it is.  both pieces, along with the missing pieces of rosette are in place.

 

We are using a piece of scrap to come up with a tint color to match the finish on the guitar.  We will use a couple of coats of tinted shellac, under nitrocellulose lacquer, to finish the job.

 

Here's our last photo.  We're brushing on the shellac--getting the tint as close as possible.  With the addition of a couple coats of lacquer, the patch ends up looking pretty good.