GET INLAID

As a result of my e-mail conversation with Larry Robinson, I decided to backtrack on project 2. He told me that it would be easier to rout accurately in hardwoods, as long as my bits were sharp, which they ought to be still. So if I was going to rout a new piece of wood anyway (which would require scribing the design on the new piece as well), I figured I had no excuse for not fixing the cursed Piece #2, and so Wednesday night I made a new one. I’ll probably end up routing the piece I’d already scribed, just for the practice, before tackling the maple.  I feel better now; I won’t have to live with the shame of my laziness forever.

I’d ordered something called a transfer marker, which was supposed to solve all my paper/superglue/pattern problems. The theory behind it was that you would put a pattern created with a toner-using copier on the shell, run the marker over it, and it would transfer to the shell, obviating the need for the paper pattern stuck to the shell. I just needed to remember to put it on the back of the shell, since the way it worked, you’d get a mirror image of the pattern. Sounds brilliant, non?

There’s a big damn difference between theory and practice.

So I put the pattern on the backside of the shell, using a little tape so it wouldn’t move once I started marking it.

I can see immediately that this is not going to be the great savior I’d hoped for. The pattern is bleeding with the moisture. A feathered, blotchy pattern isn’t going to do much for my aspirations of precision. Lesson learned? There are no shortcuts.

As I peel up the pattern, I see that I’m correct in my assessment of total suckage. The transfer is both blotchy and faint. The marker was a waste of time and money.

So I went back to the superglue/paper pattern method in the end, and managed to do it without gluing my fingers together or the shell to the workbench. She can learn!

I sawed it, and did a pretty good job for having been away from it for over a week. I also tried out a new piece of equipment, which is a aquarium pump with some tubing. It’s a lot quieter than the mini shop vac. It blows instead of sucks, and that may become an annoyance as I blow shell dust all over, but until it’s visible, I’m going to pretend I don’t know that.

I did a test run of arranging the pieces, including my new Piece #2, on tape because they move if you breathe on them wrong. It’s close, but not perfect.

Then I moved it off the tape onto the maple. I attempted to stick it to the wood using DUCO cement, as recommended in my inlay book. That stuff stinks. It also didn’t hold up so well, and the pieces came loose.

I made my orientation marks, and then let it sit a bit.

Then, being me, I couldn’t not touch it and thought I’d start scribing. That was a dumb thought. This is when I found out that the DUCO wasn’t holding, and I ended up having to rearrange the whole thing again. I tried sprayed adhesive, which dried too fast. I need it to be sticky enough to hold it, but not so fast-setting that I can’t adjust them. So I went with good old Elmer’s, and stopped touching it for the night. We’ll see tomorrow how that worked.

Then I cleaned up my bench and checked out my new piece of abalam. It’s called donkey’s ear MOP, and it’s quite a bit bigger than the blanks I’ve been using, but feels like the same material, because it is—100% shell. Don’t know yet what I’m going to use it for, but it’s cool.

So I’ve been doing research on shell veneers, which come in bigger pieces and multiple colors and are considerably cheaper than solid shell blanks.  But they’re superthin, and are meant to be glued to the wood, not actually laid into a routed cavity, and I wondered how well that could actually work.  I couldn’t find any information about their usability as inlay material other than the website selling them.  Naturally, the seller says they’re absolutely wonderful.  Pardon my skepticism.

I generally operate from the philosophy of "The worst they can say is no," so on a whim, I decided I would e-mail Larry Robinson, the man who wrote my book, with my question and see if he cared to share his expertise.  I’ve e-mailed a lot of people I don’t know, but am interested in, and have had them e-mail back, so I figured, “what the hell?”  I’ve got nothing to lose but my ignorance. 

He e-mailed me back, saying he wasn’t much for e-mailing but I could give him a call.  I tried a couple times, but we couldn’t connect, and then I left for camp.  While at camp, a fellow camper had a new custom guitar, with an absolutely beautiful mermaid on it.  The style looked familiar, so I asked her who did it.  “Larry Robinson,” she said.  He’s located in northern California.

Tuesday morning, then, when I got back to work, he’d e-mailed again, and we e-mailed a few more times that day.  He shared a couple pictures of a beautiful art nouveau design he did.  I sent him a picture of my finished project because I figured he could use a laugh.  He was very diplomatic about his unimpressedness.  Nice guy.  I also sent him a picture of my camper friend and her guitar, in case he hadn’t seen the finished product since the fretboard left his hands.

I am totally amazed that I am e-mailing about inlay technique with one of the foremost inlay artists in the world, and even more amazed that he’s bothered with little ol’ me.  It’s awfully nice of him, and very inspiring.  I can’t wait to get back to work on it, and put his advice to work.

So Sunday I started sawing piece #2 and immediately went out of the lines, so I had to make another and let it sit. That piece IS cursed, and it gets worse, but I get ahead of myself.

I had lined up my existing pieces on top of the pattern, and thought it might be worth attempting a precision routing job, leaving the thin spaces between them. It would be difficult, but worth trying, anyway. So I taped the pattern to the MDF I intended to practice on.

May I suggest that using old veggie cans, even those opened with one of those no-sharp-edges can openers, to hold small tools, is NOT the best idea. Because there’s a sharp ridge inside the can, and it’ll get ya. It did me. I was just trying to grab the scribe, too.

It wasn’t even worth it, because the scribe shredded the paper, as you see on the left above. So I did the rest with an Exacto knife, after I put pressure on my wound long enough for it to stop bleeding. I should probably put Band-Aids on my shop supply list. A big box.

Here’s the same pattern, unmasked.

This was going to be a 2-step process: rout out the center with the 1/32” bit, then do the rest with the 1/64” bit. Here’s the results of round one.

Here’s the 1/64 bit. Tiny!

Here’s round 2’s results. Not bad, but as you can see, there’s a discrepancy of depth, even though I swear I measured in both cases. I might’ve grabbed an MOP piece to measure the first bit depth, and the green abalone to measure the 2nd, now that I think of it. They’re half a millimeter different, the MOP being thicker, and that might account for this. I thought about using the smaller bit for all of it, but it would take forever, and the smaller bits are more breakable. These carbide bits weren’t cheap.

My piece #2 (III) was ready to go, so I started sawing it. All was well until somehow, (again, it’s a mystery), the edge got chipped, so I decided to fudge it by trying to glue the pieces back on, figuring I’d grind them to shape after.

In hindsight I’m ashamed at my laziness. But wait! There’s more! I did get it ground to shape, but do you think it fit into the design? Of course not. And by then, I’d glued 4 of the 5 other pieces down onto the ground for scribing. So rather than take all those off AND saw Piece #2 (IV), I decided I’d grind that bastard to shape and just stick it in there. And that didn’t go well, either. In the middle of complete disgust, Scott came out to tell me my folks had just called, so I went in to call them back. I needed the break.

After I got off the phone, I went out and ground down the piece until it mostly fit, glued it in, and walked away thinking, “It’s good enough.” But it’s not good enough; it sucks. I should’ve just made a new piece, and my impatience will result in my feeling shitty about that shortcut for awhile. It doesn’t bode well for my craftsmanship, I’ll say that much.

Impatience is my bane, over and over, as I try to learn something new. I’ve been at this a whole WEEK, and already I’m getting impatient? What the hell is wrong with me? What happened to my “Zen mind, beginner mind”? I need to settle down, take a deep breath (or ten), and throw out my expectations, or I’m not going to get anywhere but crabby.

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.