GET INLAID

As we were loading the car to head up to Scottsdale Saturday, the mailman came bearing a Stew-Mac box. We love when he does that, and by “we,” I mean the royal “We.” I tossed the box on the bench and headed out of Dodge, but I really wanted to open it and revel in new tool joy.

Sunday we got back earlier than I expected and I had some shop time, though how much time I could actually spend out there was questionable. 99 degrees in the garage. Unbelievable.

So I opened my box. In it were 2 new bottles of medium and thick superglue, which are now safely ensconced in the fridge. I had to buy new medium because it didn’t enjoy sitting out in the garage, and it got thick and unusable. (Did I mention that it gets warm out there?)

I also got 2 scrapers that I intend to use for inlay design assembly. If you bend them, the design loosens, like cracking an ice tray. That’s the theory anyway. I’m still going to have to use a little razor blade and elbow grease. In case I want to ever use them for their intended scraping purpose, I bought the burnisher for sharpening them. Right now they are dull, and I’m leaving them that way for my own safety. In addition to that stuff, I got 5 dozen saw blades. That might seem like a lot, but I broke 4 or 5 in an hour of sawing Sunday. I’ve broken as many as 10 in a long sawing session.

I had a few pieces left to cut out of the interim wood-on-wood design I was working on. I knew as I finished piece #4 that it was crappy, and a quick fit test only confirmed that. So glued up another one and set it aside.

Oddly, though all of this wood is supposedly 1/8” thick, the reality is not-so-much. The bubinga is slightly thicker than the bloodwood. It’ll sand fine, but it’s funny how, at this scale, such a slight difference is obvious. It wasn’t in the store, and I took the label at its word.

I liked this design because all the edges are straight, which makes for really easy sanding touch-up to get them perfectly so. Here’s the design assembled and glued to the scraper.

There are some gaps between pieces, but as this was just an interim project, I decided that rather than resaw a bunch of pieces (too hot in the garage—did I mention that?), that I would practice my filler skills (or, more accurately, would attempt to DEVELOP filler skills) during the sanding portion of the program.

Once the superglue had set, I cracked it off the scraper and used Elmer’s to stick the design to the alder ground. I usually use Duco cement, but that’s what I used last time when the whole piece broke in two and nearly stopped my heart, so I’m a little Duco-shy. We’ll see how that goes.

I had forgotten my iPod outside last night, so at bedtime I went back out to the garage to fetch it. And I thought, “Gee, it wouldn’t take that long to just quickly scribe this; it’s just straight lines.” Which is why I was standing out in my garage at midnight in my skivvies and bare feet, Exacto knife in hand, scribing my project. A leetle obsessed maybe? “Just let me scribe one more line…just one more…I can quit anytime…like, I’m totally in control…”