GET INLAID

I say again, we have drill press.  I ordered this for my Dremel because I thought it might help me stop drilling holes through my fingers.  It is a little sloppy, as the reviews warned, but I can work on it and finesse it with my teeny-weeny screwdriver for the teeny-weeny screws.  It was inexpensive, and if it works, it’s great; if it doesn’t, then I’ll donate it to Goodwill, add it to my charitable deductions, and get a heavier duty (and more expensive, natch) one down the road.  This thing will also turn 90 degrees to the side, which is how I was using it (in a vise) for a grinder.  I haven’t used it for that in awhile, though, so this’ll be good.  This is my spare, one-speed Dremel, the first one I ever got years ago to do a little wood carving.  I use a variable speed one for my routing.  Eventually, I will bolt it to the bench, but not until I have used it a bit and gotten everything the way I want it.

My new drill bits arrived in the mail, so I popped one into my Dremel to make the starter holes to put the saw blade through to cut out the inner pieces.

It’s putzy work, but it went better Sunday than it did the week before. I’m still going through saw blades like crazy, but other than that I didn’t have much to complain about (for a change). Nice when the broken piece stays in the piece; at least then I can find it and throw it away.

I did the small pieces that I was resawing first. My process is to put the blade through the hole(s) and cut out the insides first, keeping the main piece intact. This gives them more strength through to the end, and gives me something to hold on to. Then I cut out along the outsides of the pieces.

It ended up that I will have to do 2 more of the triangular pieces in the middle. All 3 tips are super-slender, and they tend to break off with the last bit of sawing, no matter how careful I am. Occupational hazard, it seems. I wonder if it happens to Larry Robinson. I’m guessing not.

The next step is real tricky. I have to cut out the white space in the MOP, because I will put the abalone pieces I cut out first there, but I have to fill the abalone pieces with more MOP. It only makes sense to conserve shell and cut the black piece out and set it aside. So basically, in the main piece, I have to cut out each shape twice: once to get the piece I want, and a second time to get rid of the waste I don’t want. The first thing I needed to do was to decide where to drill the hole for the saw blade to slip through. I had a lot less room then I did on the first pieces. I marked the spots where I had the most space for drilling with a green marker.

Then I held my breath and drilled the marked holes. Not bad. There was only one spot that was a little iffy.

Despite trying to drill over the hole in my bench pin, I discovered afterwards that I’d missed. 5 times. Ah well; I don’t think these bench pins are meant to be eternal, and I know where to get another one when this one is past saving.

In this picture you can see a couple different steps happening. The top cutout has had the center piece removed and now I’m cutting out the waste along the edge. The cutout right beneath it is already cleaned out.

Ordinarily, when I’m cutting shell this narrow, it is breaking off every few strokes, driving me to drink. However, since I’m just trying to get rid of it, I didn’t mind, and it’s relatively painless.

Each time I’ve completed cutting out a section of the circle, I work on putting the inner pieces together, not moving on until everything fit. This took a lot of sanding and filing, and a little sawing, too, a bit at a time. That indicates I still need to work on my sawing accuracy, which isn’t news; better to file away, because you can’t put back what you’ve already cut off. But eventually I got it to work. Here’s the piece, ready to go into the space directly to the right.

Here it is in place, and from the back. There are some gaps, but by the time it’s filled with superglue and sanded down, they won’t be as noticeable.

And here it is from the front again.

At this point, I popped out the piece and superglued the 2 smaller pieces together, and put them safely away until its time to assemble the whole thing. 2 down, 11 to go. It will be a slow process, but it might just be really cool by the time it’s done if take my time. Doing it this way also helps me keep track of where I am, because the design is so repetitive. To the eye, it looks like it’s perfectly symmetrical, but when you start sawing the pieces out and trying to get them to fit with others (even allowing for my sawing), you find that they are not. Strange, that, since this is a computer-generated clip art design.

Other stuff…

In addition to my new drill bits, I ordered some sanding tape. I already had sanding cord for getting into nooks and crannies, but I needed something for small flat spaces that were too small to get a file into. I attach them to the bench with a clamp, thread the pieces onto it, hold on to the other end, and run the pieces up and down until they’re the way I want them.

Also, I’m enjoying the new kinder, gentler shell reclamation process that has come from attaching my patterns to the shell with Elmer’s glue. I drop them in a little water, screw the top on, and shake it from time to time. When I get back to them, the paper has removed itself, and I have clean shell to reuse later without hurting my eyes or giving myself a headache. Lovely! I keep an old pump bottle filled with water out on my bench, since I don’t have running water out there, and it works like a quickie faucet when I need a little water for this, or for my sharpening stone, or what have you.

More sawing next weekend!

The first order of business Saturday was to put the battery I hoped was charged into my drill and put a few more holes to cut out center pieces. I did, and it seemed to have enough juice. I did one. No problem. I did a 2nd one. Then the bit broke, which would’ve been bad enough, as it was my only small bit. But the drill, no longer propped up on its bit, succumbed to gravity. What happened next happened so fast I don’t even know WHAT happened, but I did know that my thumb was bleeding and it hurt like a bitch.

From the circumstantial evidence, I can surmise that gravity brought the drill down on the thumb holding the piece of shell in place, with the bit still moving for a second and now ragged and sharp, and then it glanced off. You can see what’s left of the bit still chucked in the drill. I didn’t find the other piece until later in the afternoon when I cleaned my bench. Glad I was wearing eye protection like a good girl.

I went into the house and showed my owie to Scott, who told me in no uncertain terms that he did not want to see it. Apparently, he’s more squeamish than I thought. No sympathy around here!

After I washed it off, I could see that the drill bit had gone through the nail halfway in from the tip of my finger, and nicked the finger good, too. It’s going to take awhile to grow out. I really do have a talent for inflicting original injuries upon myself. I fear that the family power-tool curse, which heretofore has only affected the males, may well have begun to experience a bit of mission creep. I’m going to need to say a novena to the patron saint of workshops. Once I figure out who that is.

Considering that a Band-Aid would’ve just gotten in my way, I did what I do with most cuts on my fingers these days: I superglued it. I was going to use medium superglue, but when I grabbed it out of the box, the bottle was all misshapen.

Perhaps leaving my glue out in the garage during the summer is not my best-laid plan. It’s still fluid, but barely. I think it’s probably shot. So I used a few layers of thin glue. It still hurts, but it’s protected.

The breaking of the bit, however, put a crimp in my plans for the day, because if I couldn’t drill holes, I couldn’t saw. I had tried one piece cutting out the middle last, but then I didn’t have much to hold on to as I sawed, and the piece got increasingly vulnerable the more I cut. Leaving it as part of the larger shell blank until almost the end, having cut out the center first, worked a lot better. I finished drilling the hole I’d been in the middle of with a one of the finger drills, but I’ll have to wait until the bits I ordered for my Dremel arrive to continue.

I sawed those 2 pieces and another, finished cutting out the perimeter of the main MOP piece and sanded it round, glued new patterns to shell, and called it a day. Now I just have to wait for the postman.

Well, let’s see here, I’m only a week behind in writing this post. It’s been a tough week, though, so I’m going to cut my self some slack. I didn’t accomplish as much as I wanted to last weekend.

I started sawing, and because these pieces have to have other pieces cut out from the inside, I needed to drill a hole through the waste section to thread my saw blade through. I figured I was all set because I’d purchased these wee finger drills from MicroMark just for the purpose. I’ve gotten a lot of tools from them.

So I started drilling, and soon realized that it would be a month of Sundays before I got through the shell with the finger drill. Time for plan B.

I suppose I should’ve had an inkling that it wasn’t going to be a banner day for sawing if I was moving on to plan B within 10 minutes of starting.

But move on I did. I got my cordless drill out, and then grabbed the box o’ bits, only to find that the 2 holes for a 1/16” bit were empty. I went in to ask Scott if he knew where they were in use, and he didn’t, but he had another box of bits in his studio. There was one in there. I started drilling, and it was slick. Went right through.

I put holes in pieces until the battery ran down. I think my battery packs for that drill are shot, and have been for a long time. Keeping them out in the garage probably doesn’t help, but they don’t hold a charge for long. I suspect I could buy a new corded drill for what it would cost me to buy 2 replacement battery packs, and have all my drilling needs for life covered. Ah, but here I see that MicroMark has small drill bits with 1/8” shanks that will fit right into my spare Dremel. Methinks that will be the way to go for the time being.

So here we have a piece drilled and ready to saw. I want to saw the white parts out. The inner and the outer bits around it will be MOP. The trick here is to put the blade through the hole, and cut it out from there. Simple enough in concept.

But I ended up tossing the first 2 pieces I cut. You can see that they are not real even and smooth on the inside. But practice is practice.

I kept it up, and I was using these fine saw blades that I bought awhile back, only to find I didn’t care for them. They were TOO fine, and they broke if you looked at them funny. But they were the package I had open, so I thought I’d try to use them up. And use them up I did, as I went through 9 or 10 of them in the hour I was sawing, only to have 3 pieces completed. At that point, it was a million degrees in the garage, I was discouraged, and my neck hurt, so I went in, to return another day. But I won’t have to deal with those crappy blades anymore; they’re all gone.

In other news, and in anticipation of my next project, I ordered some materials from a new supplier, Rescue Pearl. I got some pink mussel and reconstituted stone: banded Malachite (green), Rhodonite (pink), and Blue River Agate (blue). I also got some paua curved strips for plant stems (not pictured). It’s a little cooler today, so perhaps I will make greater headway in the sawing department.