GET INLAID

I have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, aka the Woodcraft store. I haven’t been up until now because I knew I’d be overwhelmed and probably spend too much, and did I really need to be messing about with wood when I was still feeling my way with shell? But Saturday I made the trek across town to see about getting some wood to do multimedia inlays.

I daresay I did all right on that count.

So what do we have here? Top to bottom, and then moving to the right, we have, if memory serves (and if it doesn’t, I’ll slip out to the garage and refresh it): padauk, mahogany, cherry, maple, zebrawood, bubinga (the same wood Stella’s made of), yellowheart, Brazilian rosewood, maple again (but with a different figure), purpleheart, and bloodwood. Whew. And I didn’t even have to get up from my chair. The purpleheart and the padauk might be a mistake, in the sense that the guy told me that they turn brown, rather than staying orange and purple. I realized I’d read that about the purpleheart, that it turns a dried blood color. Wish I’d remembered it sooner. Most of the wood is 1/8” thick, with a few at 1/16”. My book recommended 1/8”, even though it was significantly thicker than any shell I use, because it holds up better to sawing, and the author said it sands down faster than shell. And that’s mostly what they had, so that’s what I got. But the maple and the mahogany was available in 1/16”, which is pretty close to what my shell is, so I thought I’d give it a try. And the vast sections of ungrained maple in the piece furthest right in the pictures will make great skin color, I think, which is why I picked it. I stood in front of the display for a good long time, comparing pieces. I was, not too surprisingly, the only woman in the store.

The pieces are big enough that they’ll last me a long time. I picked pieces with a variety of figure and grain patterns, sometimes within one piece, that’ll come in handy. Used mindfully, you can add to the texture of the piece. Like on that art deco piece I want to do, I am going to use single pieces for her scarf, which if I used shell wouldn’t drape all that much. But if I use wood, it’ll look like it’s draped if I choose well with the wood grain.

Other than these pieces of wood, I was very good. I bought some abrasive cord for sanding in little corners and nooks of pieces, and a new ruler. I don’t have a good metal ruler in that size, and this one has metric/standard conversions on the backside, which is nice.

When I got home, I decided to clean up my work area, and then work on my drawings for the next projects. Here’s the first one, a geometric pattern.

On the bottom left is the original, blown up on a copier from a small piece of clipart. It’s all pixilated, and it wouldn’t do on its own, so I started tracing. The first tracing is above it, the next is on the tracing light. There were others started during the process that were aborted due to irretrievable mistakes. I even used my little carpenter’s square to make sure all the square bits stayed that way. I really spent more time on these tracings than on any previous, I think. A good drawing is a good start, and on a symmetrical geometric pattern, if you’re off, it’s going to show; the eye will catch it.

Here’s the final drawing, ready for shrinking and copying. At the size I’m going to do this, some pieces were able to be combined, which will make the piece flow better. I also think the fewer the putzy pieces, the more likely I will get them all to fit together and get the cavity routed properly. We’ll see how that little hypothesis plays out.

I also started work on the next drawing, which is the art deco design, and got the first tracing done. One more to clean it up ought to do it.

I could conceivably do the whole thing out of wood, but we’ll see. My plan at this point is the maple for her skin, some darker wood for her scarf, reconstituted obsidian (which I’ve yet to order) for her hair and facial features, and alternating MOP and gold MOP for the stylized sun she’s holding. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, so we’ll see.

The third video in the set arrived this week, so I need to find time to watch it, too. I’m hoping he’ll talk about using wood in his inlays.

I was looking through old blog archives the other day, and I found this quote at the top of one.  I had forgotten it’d ever been there, and I cannot even remember what the context was, but it seems like a good thing to remember:

Don’t put a router up your nose.–Antiguo

It has been 9 months today, and he’s still looking out for me.  I hope he’s proud of my little sawdust efforts.

I decided to hold off buying the materials for the art deco design I mentioned a couple posts back. The federal government has informed me, via TurboTax, that it prefer those dollars go to it this month, and so it shall be. I’ve decided to go back to those geometric designs I had started with, and use up the shell I have in the meantime. It’ll be both economic and make good sense as I backtrack to simpler designs and work on greater precision throughout the process. I’ve still got quite a bit of MOP and green abalone, but the paua is almost gone. Which is fine at this point. It’s pretty, but it’s tricky to work with. And then next month, I’ll be ready and able to order what I really want, materials-wise.

In other news, I did get my handle on my graver through a process of drilling and hammering. I drilled the hole as wide as I could reasonably drill it, placed the graver in a vise, then put the handle on top and gave it a few raps to get it down. It worked, but perhaps a little too well. It cracked the handle in 3 places. But it’s holding, and I filled the cracks with superglue. It feels pretty strong, and if I’m wrong, I’ll order another handle and be a little more judicious in my hammer application. You’d think they’d send directions with those things.

I also picked up an organizer for all the little pieces I had in various containers and cupboards in the general bench area. I like this better.

In the midst of project #4, I took the time to make my sanding block, since my circular saw had arrived and my vacuum filters had not. The saw is great—it cuts all the way through on the first pass. ‘Tis a powerful machine, for sure, and I give it a lot of respect. I think it was a good choice over the table saw, which is way more than I needed. I had vaguely entertained some woodworking fantasies, but I had to stop reading the book. It only provoked questions I really wanted to ask Antiguo, and the fact that I couldn’t…well, it was bringing me down. I decided to put it away. I didn’t need to torture myself. It’s hard enough as it is; I don’t need to actively make it worse.

My new little bench, bought specifically for sawing stuff but it makes a handy side table, too, has wood holders to hold the work as you cut it. That was slick, and I didn’t have to futz with clamps, although it might not have been a bad idea. But I did okay.

Here’s the block after the first cut. I was a little concerned about the green paint on the wood—I don’t know if that was normal upon first use, or a sign that the saw was binding a bit. I still don’t know, but it didn’t feel like it was stuck when I was sawing. I don’t know what kind of wood it is—it was in the unnamed scrap I got from the one guy—but it’s heavy, hard, and thick. It fought the router, too.

A little sanding on the corners to round it for my hand and remove the splinters, et voila! Just add sandpaper.

I think it’s lovely, but I got to thinking it could use a little…embellishment. My first thought was to put my name and maybe some doodles on it in Sharpie. And then I thought, "Hey, I could inlay it!" Practice is practice.

I did a quick and dirty monogram directly on the shell pieces with Sharpie. Sharpie, I discovered, does wipe off shell if you handle it too much, so I had to rewrite it a few times before I was done, but it was good enough for what it was for.

I used my new jeweler’s saw and it was slick. I ended up having to resaw the K 3 times and the N twice—those little bits like to break off. I’m learning, slowly, to scope out the design for potential weak spots and cut in an order to give the weakest pieces the most support during cutting by leaving shell around them as long as possible, but I’m inconsistent at this still.

I used the paint-and-scribe method, which I’d used on the flower project, but hadn’t yet routed.

I went right to routing as soon as I’d scribed and removed the shell, starting with the pointed burr, then trying a rounder one, since the letters were small. I think I can skip the outlining step; I don’t find it helps, and it’s added time. I don’t mind spending the time if it’s going to mean better work, but it’s not in this case.

The bit I started with, also a dental burr, but a rounded one, literally burned the wood. Uh-oh. Not sure what the problem was. You can see the burn marks on the burr, too.

I adjusted the depth and started again, and eventually got it routed.

You’ll notice that the corners aren’t too sharp, so I thought I’d try out my chisels. That worked! And it works at my speed: slow. I used the chisel as I dry-fitted the pieces, as well, both to mark tight spots and to clean those spots up a little at a time.

A little tweaking here and there and the pieces fit. Yay. Only a couple obvious places where I lost control of the router.

A little glue, a little time out in the sun, and it was ready to sand. I used the scrap piece as a makeshift sanding block to sand this one, and I suppose if I wanted to, I could round off the edges of that one, too, and have two. One plus from using the paint-and-scribe method is that the excess superglue tends to lie on top of the paint instead of soaking into the grain of the wood where I spend a lot of time trying to sand out the darkness it imparts. I wondered if that would be the case.

So I got something satisfying out of project #3 anyway, even if it wasn’t project #3, and am proud to have made and marked my own tool, regardless of the fact that it’s about the world’s simplest tool. "Behold! I have taken an ordinary block of wood and made…a block of wood." But how many people have inlaid sanding blocks, I ask you?