GET INLAID

I have to say that I am really proud of how this project turned out.  It took a lot of work, sometimes redoing whole steps, but it was worth it.  It is the best one yet, if I do say so.  To really get the full effect, and also note what I’m talking about below, you really should look at the bigger one.  G’head, click it.  I’ll wait.

I learned quite a few things about wood in this project, like how fragile it is along the grain lines, especially when using thin stock like I do.  I also learned that those grain lines can move.  For example, the grain line that goes from the small of her back up her nose?  That wasn’t in the piece I cut out.  It was revealed by sanding.  The same issue affected her leg, too, and a little bit on her right arm.  I’ll have to keep that in the mind in the future.  If the ebony hadn’t been 1/32" thinner than the rest of the wood, I wouldn’t have had to sand so much, but I know a way around that, too, that I learned from my inlay videos.  I should’ve used that knowledge this time, but I wasn’t expecting the grain not to be the same all the way through.  Still, I’m so pleased with the rest of it that I’m not going to let it detract from my project joy; it is always so ephemeral in this work! 

I  also learned that cocobolo (the ground) is a very porous wood, and it collects the dust from sanding something awful.  I sucked out what I could with the vacuum, and then took a damp rag to it after that, and it’s not bad, but I can see a few spots where lighter dust got stuck.

I learned that engraving (or an approximation) wood and putting ink into it is a dicey prospect, but I think I did okay in the end. I used a microfine Uniball pen on her nose, mouth, jaw, the bit of hair on the left side of her face, and the lines of her neck and breasts. I could’ve sealed it with lacquer first, then engraved, to avoid any possible bleeding of the ink, but I don’t have lacquer, and didn’t want to mess with that.  I tested it on a piece of scrap wood instead, and then tested it with the oil finish, too, before risking it on the actual project.  This piece still needs a couple more coats of the Tung oil, but I couldn’t wait for show-and-tell.

This is a project I wouldn’t be embarrassed to put out on my mantel.  If I had a mantel.  Maybe I’ll be able to do this after all.   I have no idea what I want to do next; I’ll have to think about that.  But I’ll be going into it feeling a bit more confident.

Did I just jinx myself?  Those words may come back to haunt me. 

Saturday morning, late, I made it out to the garage to work on my inlay. My hope was to get it scribed, routed, and glued before the day was out so I could do sanding on Sunday. It is getting ridiculously hot in the garage, mostly because it’s ludicrously hot outside the garage, and the fan isn’t quite enough. So far, I’ve just put up with the sweating, but I think it may be time to pull down the portable swamp cooler. I haven’t used it yet, but Scott had it in his studio shed at the last house.

Anyway, the scribing went pretty well, even with the Exacto knife, which was a pleasant change. Just goofs, and none so deep that they wouldn’t sand out in the normal course of sanding.

I stuck some double-sided carpet tape on the back of the wood and stuck it to the bench, but it wasn’t gripping enough, so I grabbed a piece of maple and stuck it to that, then clamped the maple to the bench. I’d done this before on a piece of slightly curved ebony, and it helped but I don’t think it added much to the experience in this case.

I did the routing, but made a few glaring errors, the kind you know you’re making as you do it.

I did discover something, though. I discovered that if the router bit touched the wood coming back around, at about 9 o’clock, I had more control. If it touched it at 3-4 o’clock, it had a tendency to just keep going, leaving me with the problems you saw above. This explains, in more detail than I’d figured out heretofore, why I always have more errors on the right-hand side of a design then the left. Because I, too, tend to work counter-clockwise, pulling the router towards me from 12 to 6, and then pushing it away from me from 6 to 12 again.

I decided round 1 of routing was crap, and flipped the piece of wood over to try it again. That’s a plus to using thick wood; you can do that. I was still hoping to stick to my schedule, so I quickly cemented the design down and clamped it, because there were bits that tended to stick up the first time, and I wanted to avoid that the second time. It was clamped tightly enough that I scribed around the bits that were not obstructed by the clamps while it sat there, then moved the clamps to finished spots to get the remaining areas. I had it scribed, again with no problems, before the glue dried.

This time I dispensed with the maple and clamped it directly to the bench, moving the wood and the clamp as needed.

I hogged out the center of the design first, and then I very slowly and carefully went back over the edges, putting my new router-bit-rotation knowledge to work immediately. It helped a lot. In fact, it was so successful, I never used other than my 1/32” router bit; I skipped the dental burr stage entirely. This design had no super-tight corners, which allowed that.

I still needed to do a little clean-up to get the design to fit, but I took it slow, marking and routing ever so slightly. Patience pays off. Who knew?

Thar be sanding on Sunday.

Well, it went better this time.  I resawed all the pieces, and they fit together.  The black stuff is some ebony dust I used to fill some gaps around the hair, but even those were minor.  I feel so much better about the world now.

Also, I found I had a new buddy on my workbench.  He kept hanging around, disappeared, and then came back.  I needed the piece of wood he was sitting on, so I brought him outside and put him in the tall grass. He looks more grasshoppery than crickety; he’s got nice desert camos, though. 

I had left the trickiest bits for last, to saw when I was mentally fresh. I did the arm piece first, and found that the last little finger broke along a grain line when I finished it at that point. So I superglued it and set it aside, hoping for the best.

In the process of doing that, however, I managed to glue my fingers together. It took a good 5 minutes (or rather a bad 5) and the bulk of my superglue remover to get them apart again. I’m going to have to order some more. And be more careful. I suppose I could wait and see if I can use acetone straight without it eating the skin off my bones. It’s a lot cheaper than this stuff.

After I had full use of all my digits restored, I continued sawing. I had trouble with the ebony eye parts as well. The pieces were so delicate that they, too, cracked along the grain and in weak spots. I had similar problems with the maple face piece. I ended up regluing a pattern for the face and the entire arm section onto maple again.

I did 2 more of the ebony hair/eye pieces, and both of them cracked, so I did a 3rd one. This time I decided to also glue some backing paper to the ebony, operating under the theory that maybe the thin pieces would hold up if they were supported on both sides by paper. I also put a finer sawblade in the saw. I’ve been going through sawblades like crazy on this project. I don’t know if it’s the wood vs. shell or what.

That actually worked quite well, and I was thrilled when the two face pieces fit perfectly. So I started putting the pieces together, starting with the face, moving to the sun, and then moving downward. I glued as I went, and everything was going well, but gluing as I went turned out to be a fatal mistake. Because by the time I got around to the last body pieces, I realized that the alignment was off, and I had an insurmountable gap between the body scarf and the body.

I stared at it awhile, trying to figure out how to salvage it. I attempted to trace the new configuration, with a thought of cutting a new scarf piece, but that didn’t work. I took a rubbing, but couldn’t get a clear enough outline to feel confident that the new piece would fit. I knew it was pretty hopeless, but I even tried forcing the pieces closer in. I knew that was not wise, and it wasn’t, but the reality was that I wasn’t going to be able to fix it. When I broke the hand in half, I assured that was the case.

I’d spent hours on it, only to end up starting over. There was a lot of sighing and frowning at this point. I had a very few pieces that were still unglued, and I compared those to the pattern for accuracy to see if I could use them still. A couple were okay, but I decided to recut the scarf for greater accuracy. And I ended the evening regluing fresh patterns to fresh wood. I went ahead and backed the pieces that had given me trouble the first time through, having learned that helped stabilize them.

I did save this part, not for use, but for encouragement. It came together pretty well, and I think the all-wood design is going to be cool, if I can just saw accurately. Clearly, I can do it some of the time. So maybe, with more practice, I’ll eventually be able to do it all of the time. It’s a good thing I kept my day job.

Today I’ll be sawing again. Wish me luck.