Still learning
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.
