GET INLAID

So…practice project #2. First things first. I discovered something very disturbing while I was sawing away to the sounds of one of my local radio stations via boombox during project #1, and that is that my reasons for not listening to radio anymore are completely valid: It sucks. It sucks in that in a 3-hour period I was already hearing repeats of songs, often, it seemed, in the same order is the first time I heard them. It appears to mine ear that they have a playlist that is about a dozen deep, and they just put it on replay over and over again. It’s shocking. It’s beyond appalling. Oh, the radio station I could run off my iPod alone, which is only half my collection. So it was clear to me that the next piece of shop equipment I needed to invest in was a pair of speakers for my iPod. I could put up with it once, but not for a second project. I researched online, and then decided to take a trip to Target and see what they had. They’re shop speakers, and I really didn’t want to spend a ton on something I might accidentally superglue to my own head or destroy in a bizarre out-of-control router accident, or, more likely via an accumulation of work and desert dust. The cheapest ones seemed to be about $70 and I was reluctant to spend that much, and then I spied a set for the low, low price of $19.99 hiding on a bottom shelf, in the corner. Cool. Now we’re cooking with gas! And I am freed from the craptastic radio.

I’d picked out the pattern and glued pattern pieces onto the shell while I waited for project #1 to dry at one point, so that was already taken care of. But I only had one more chunk of MDF to put the inlay into it, and I wasn’t really excited about it. Because it’s ugly, it needs to be painted or some such, and the painting, while expedient for a first project, ruined my careful sanding job. So I decided I was going to go ahead and practice routing the new design in the MDF when the time came, but that I would ultimately put it into a ground of real wood this time. I dug through my wood to look for something appropriate, something not too heavy-duty for my first try at real wood. The wood I got from the first guy I didn’t label, nor did he explain what all of it was, but the 2nd guy said you could tell by both grain and weight, so I picked the lightest I could find. It seems to be an old door or something, as it’s got holes in it already and some kind of old finish that seems to be cracking and splintering. It seems old. I needed to cut it up into smaller, usable pieces.

The piece was odd-sized to begin with, so I figured I’d just cut a straight line, and then measure from it, which is what I did to cut off the nail holes that were in it. I think I will invest in a legible carpenter’s square. I already do enough squinting, and this rusted one is just more squinting than I need.

It was going well enough, and then I realized my clamp was in the way of my finishing the cut.

So I had to turn around and come at it from the other side. Somehow, this got me offset just a bit, and the cut didn’t turn out as straight as I wanted. I guess I could’ve avoided that by cutting the whole thing from the other side in the first place. I’m going to have to overcome my righty tendencies, I guess.

The cut was clean, but the edges were rough and splintery, as if the top layer was coming up with whatever finish was on there. I got my first official splinter of this project picking the piece up. I ended up sanding the rough edges so that I could work with them with minimal peril, and it took a sanding, so it should be fine for later. I’ll find out.

On to the shell. You may recall that I tried to soak up the excess superglue pooling on top, in the hopes that it would give up the pattern better when it came time to sand. This may have been a mistake, because some of the pieces were already losing their patterns.

A loose pattern not attached to shell does me no good, so piece #2, which I grabbed first, had to be reglued and set aside. So I grabbed another one while it dried. Check out that nice clean sawing action!

I used Phaedrous’ idea of a grinder for fine tuning rough edges (Thanks, P!), and impressed my old Dremel that I never use into service for just that. It’s slick, but I’m ever aware that one wrong move will fuck up the piece or hurt me, it’s moving so fast, so I’m very careful. But I’m pleased that that old Dremel is making dust now instead of just collecting it. Sad to see abandoned tools. And it works wonderfully for this. But the ground shell really stinks, worse than sawing it for some unknown reason.

Here’s the first piece, done. This pattern has 6 pieces, and every one of them looks exactly like this one. But I don’t know that I approached the cuts the same way each time. I’d like to say it was a Zen thing, but it was probably that I’m just inconsistent. I did end up grinding a bit more of that pattern that’s still showing off later.

I had nearly finished sawing piece #4 and then I bumped it against I don’t know what, and chipped the slender pointed end off. I was unimpressed. So into the scrap container it went and I had to dig through to find another piece of shell and glue a fresh pattern to it. Those little holes you see? Those are worm holes, common to all abalone. The quality of abalone I’m working with is that it has one good side, which is the side that is more polished when it arrives. I imagine abalone that’s good on both sides is more expensive. I had one piece in the first project wherein the holes were only visible once I’d sanded down to that layer. For my purposes, that’s fine, and I don’t really mind them too much. But I don’t think you can allow that in professional-grade inlaying.

I didn’t soak up the excess glue this time so that the pattern would stay attached. The problem with working with superglue is that you cannot hold the paper down with the glue until it sets, or it will be bonded to your fingers. I had a broken saw blade, so I used that to press the paper down as much as possible, since it’s metal and less likely to stick immediately, and has a small footprint, and then used it as a wee jack under the piece to keep the shell from sticking to the wax paper. The blade ended up sticking to the shell, but it was easily removed, and then I just ground away the dried superglue residue so it would lie flat.

Piece #2 was just cursed. Once it was dry, I started sawing it. As I started sawing, the pattern came off again, and that end of it crumbled and cracked as I sawed, but I wasn’t sure how bad the damage was until it was done. It came out short, and I had to make a new one anyway. I think it was a bad piece of shell, or perhaps a partially bad piece with a weak spot in exactly the worst place for it. Had it been in the middle of the piece instead of an end, it might not have mattered.

So here is the test fit. It looks pretty good, and those pieces that were a bit rough I took to the grinder to clean them up. I can see again, and finally understand, that I’m going to have to have patterns with thinner lines than this, because it’s putting an unacceptable amount of space between pieces. Too late for this round, and I suppose I could work around it with some precision routing (ha!), leaving the wood in between the pieces. Don’t know if I can manage it, but all I can do is try. Piece #2 is missing from this picture because it’s drying.