GET INLAID

Saturday after I’d glued the design into the ground, I wasn’t quite ready to leave the shop. I just hadn’t sweat enough, so I started thinking about my next project. I hadn’t finished the drawing for the one I had in mind, so I looked at the sheet I had, since I’d made multiple copies of the last design.

I picked a relatively simple design, and decided to do it all in wood. That’ll be project #8. I could do with some “simple” after that last one.

I cut out patterns and glued them to wood: from the left, it’s bubinga (same as my Stella, but a different figure), Bolivian rosewood, and bloodwood, and I’ll inlay it into a risky alder. I’m feeling frisky, and want to keep the level of routing concern high. I let those sit while I worked on the drawing for project #9.

I’d found a fuchsia stencil awhile back that I’d blown up for tracing but had yet to trace. So I worked on that, adjusting it to be easier to saw. For example, I traced the actual curved strips I bought for the green bits, and I intend to make the thin bits coming out of the bottom of the flower one piece of shell, which I’ll engrave to make it look like that. I’m starting to think about sawing at the drawing stage, and combine pieces or adjust lines to avoid problems once I’m sawing. I gain nothing from drawing skinny little pieces I don’t have the skill to do other than break half-way through 50 times at this point.

It took 3 tracings, but I got it done. Eventually, I copied it at 50% for cutting and it’s ready for the next step.

By the time I was finished with my drawing, the glue had dried, so I sawed all but one of the triangles for project #7. I’m glad I worked ahead, as I’ll be up in Phoenix for most of the weekend and won’t have much time at home to work on it.

I like wood, because you can sand edges straight and clean much more easily. I don’t like wood, because when you’re cross-cutting with the jeweler’s saw, it fights more, and is stickier, than shell. The fuchsia project is going to be a combination of shell, wood, and reconstituted stone, which will be a new material for me. Should be interesting. Each material is so different, even between different types of shell or hardwood.

8 months ago I didn’t know that, though. So yay me! I’m learning!

So Saturday morning, I went out to the shop, full of hope and enthusiasm, ready to scribe and rout. I’d gotten everything ready the night before, and all I had to do was go in, draw a circle, and I would be set. Which I did.

And then I carefully used my razorblade to remove the design from the rosewood after scribing.

Words cannot convey how shocked and upset I was. In fact, just LOOKING at the photo now, with 24 hours between me and the horrid event, still causes my heart to skip a beat. I really could’ve just cried. I almost did. I was dumbstruck, and just sat there staring at it for the longest time. All that work. All that intricate sawing and cutting and sanding and filing and assembling, undone in a nanosecond. I still don’t know how it happened. I was careful, and hadn’t put that much glue on it.

I pondered quitting right then and there, not entirely sure if I meant that particular project or the whole works. I pondered redoing the entire project, which is what I would’ve had to do if this were a “real” project in my future imaginary shop, and decided I didn’t have the heart. Finally, I decided to glue the two broken pieces together, accept that the finished product would be marred, and get the practice on the rest of the steps in. But man…

The scribing was straightforward enough.

I usually rout everything with a 1/32” router bit, but given how much material I had to get through and the simplicity of the design, I decided to hog out the center with the 1/8” first and clean up with the 1/32” bit.

I recently picked up a pair of Dremel chucks. The theory was that I wouldn’t have to fart around with switching between collets and could just rechuck whatever bit I was using, including the wee dental burrs with a minimum of muss and fuss. The actual practice was, of course, not so smooth. The chuck wouldn’t hold tightly enough to the bit, and it was sliding out and pushing back while I was using it, and generally being a nuisance. So I chucked the chuck in a bin and went back to the collet. You will also note in this picture that my thumb is healing, slowly. It doesn’t hurt anymore.

However, that was no guarantee of routing consistency, either, apparently. I measured everything carefully, tightened everything well, and thought I was good to go.

However, while everything started fine, I noticed a terraced effect in the routing. The bit was being pulled out as it worked. So I tightened everything up again, including the router base, and tried again.

This b.s. went on throughout the routing process, including switching to the smaller bit. I coped by stopping periodically to make sure everything was tight. It may be the collet/nut deal around the bit itself, and maybe I need to use that little wrench that came with the Dremel. Could be that hand-tightening just isn’t enough.

I usually stick a piece of double-sided carpet tape to the piece I’m routing/sanding so that I don’t have negotiate around a clamp, but it just didn’t want to stay put so I ended up clamping anyway. I’m going to have to come up with something that will work better for that purpose.

I got this far with the 1/8” bit, and then went in to do clean-up with the 1/32”. It was pretty painless, and I am slowly learning to control my router. There were a few spots where it decided to get away from me, but given that I had to expand the cavity after anyway, because it was tight, most of those spots disappeared in the end.

I’d dry-fit the piece, gingerly as I didn’t want it to break again along the new existing fault line, rout some, and repeat until it dropped in. My hesitance to handle it overmuch resulted in the design being slightly skewed in the end because I didn’t want to pull it out again.
I glued it in, touching it up with more glue after the first layer had dried, and left it overnight Saturday.

Sunday then was all sanding. Wood dust gets caught in tiny cavities in the drying, and dried, superglue, and somehow doesn’t come out nearly as easily as it goes in.

I spent a lot of time picking out sawdust and air bubbles with a needle awl and Exacto knife, and regluing, and waiting. I stuck it out in the sun on the bricks to dry faster. Funny how that worked. It was hot in the garage, even with a fan and a portable swamp cooler. I was dripping while sanding. Sanding is very physical work, though I think I like that about it. You feel productive.

After much sanding, a little water cleanup, and a Tung oil bath, she is finished.

The crack doesn’t show too badly, and if you didn’t know it was there, you could easily think it was part of the figure of the MOP, which does have a really nice figure to it. To my eyes, the gaps between pieces are really obnoxious. Also, the importance of the careful selection of colors of pieces is highlighted by that one very blue-green piece of green abalone, where all the rest are more subdued.  It sticks out like a sore thumb.

I learned a lot, and it was a challenging design, but I’m just not feeling the pride on this one that I did on the last one, and I’m not sure why. When you make it, you know where every flaw is, so it’s hard to appreciate it, I think. Or maybe because I had an emotional investment in the design of the other one—it was an image I’d wanted to do for a long time. This one I picked because it was a technical challenge. Who knows?

Onward! I have projects 8 and 9 semi-started. More on that soon.

I decided Friday night that I could do the clean-up and assembly of the pieces I cut last weekend, perhaps even getting it glued to the ground so that Saturday I could scribe and rout and glue the design in, and sand and finish Sunday. We’ll see if those are famous last words or what.

Clean-up involved me taking an Exacto knife to the cut pieces to remove the superglue I’d put the small pieces together with last Sunday, and get the wax paper off as well. It became clear pretty quickly that a) I had gone too heavy on the superglue, and b) it wasn’t going to come off easily with an Exacto knife. Superglue dries brittle, and it wasn’t having any of my feeble attempts to get rid of it.

I created a miniature acetone bath in an empty pill bottle, and dropped the pieces in 1 or 2 at a time (so I wouldn’t lose track of where I was). In some cases, there was little enough glue on the piece that they came out clean as a whistle. In others, the glue at least was softened enough that I could scrape it off.

The scraping took a lot of time anyway; I’ll be more careful with the superglue next time. I probably could’ve skipped gluing them until the end, but I was paranoid about losing small pieces and—HORRORS!—having to pull out the saw again when I was done. A minor blood sacrifice was paid to the Exacto knife gods, but I think I’ll live. Dem knives are sharp, even when they’re dull. But eventually I got all the pieces fitted. Voila!

I superglued (lightly!) the whole piece and put it in the top of an Altoids container. I’d read somewhere, maybe it was Larry Robinson, about gluing the design together on a cabinet scraper, and then when you bend it, it comes up. I’ve thought about it, but wasn’t sure how it would work, so I gave it a test run on this. It is superior, and I don’t think I’m going to fart around with wax paper, at least at this stage, again. The superglue sticks to it, and it’s a pain to clean off. I’ll be getting me one of those cabinet scrapers. I think I got a Woodcraft coupon just the other day, as a matter of fact.

I realized that I’d gotten this far without deciding what ground I was going to put this inlay into. I went into ye olde wood bin and grabbed a piece of Bolivian rosewood that caught my eye.

I measured it against the design itself, marked it, and then cut it with my circular saw. Damn, that thing’s loud, and it really seems overkill for a 3/8” piece of wood. I’ve been talking to my new inlay buddy Athena about the joys of bandsaws. I think there may be one in my future. I just got a new, powerful Milwaukee drill, refurbished. Hello, my name is Kristie, and I’m a toolaholic. I probably should not admit publicly that I got a little thrill holding it in my hand.

I sanded the excess glue off the back, even though it was still a bit damp, and stuck the design to the rosewood with Duco cement, where it’ll sit overnight. Tomorrow then, I can scribe and rout. Considering that it’s just a circle, routing should be fairly straightforward. Now that I’ve jinxed myself, we’ll see.

Seriously, does it get much more attractive than this?

I thought not. Every guy’s crazy ‘bout an OptiVisored gal. I picked up this OptiVisor, which magnifies things 2x at a 4” focal length, with the idea that seeing better would equal sawing better. (Thanks, Ath!) Not sure how I feel about it yet. I did manage NOT to make myself motion sick with it by remembering 95% of the time to lift the visor up before I moved my head. It definitely magnifies, which is good. And 4” is about where my face is anyway when I saw. However, the Optivisor extends significantly beyond my glasses, the result of which is that I am constantly hitting them with the saw on the up-stroke.  Doh!  And sometimes I forgot and didn’t put the visor back down, and sawed anyway. The fact that I didn’t notice it until later makes me wonder how much good it really does; if it were fabulous, I would’ve noticed the difference immediately and wanted to have the visor down. Although I must say, the whole ensemble has the added bonus of scaring the neighbor kids who pass by the garage.  Beware of women who have tools and know how to use them; they put up with zero shit!

Anyway, Saturday was largely taken up with birthday doings across town for a dear friend, though I headed home earlier than I usually would because the monsoon seemed to be threatening massive nastiness. The sky to the east was already darkening with thunderheads when I left the house at 11:20 a.m. (As is usual, the worse it looks, the less likely it is to rain, and we didn’t get any rain until sometime in the night long after bedtime.) I took advantage of the relatively cool day (only in the 80s) to find my workbench. The garage was, in a word, trashed. I could barely get in and out of my car, for all the boxes and stuff that had been pulled out of cabinets and not put back. I broke down boxes, found homes for the crap that I needed to keep, and even went so far as to shop-vac the entire floor, including the nooks and crannies. I found a very large, very dead tarantula hiding in the corner beneath Scott’s golf cart, a cart which has not been used in the 9 years we’ve lived in Tucson, but made the trip from Minnesota nonetheless. I would’ve shop-vac’ed the tarantula, too, but Scott insisted on sweeping it up on its own. I let ‘im.

Behold, then, the clean garage, and my excavated workbench, which would’ve been unusable in its state prior to cleaning.

I needed to drill a couple holes into some replacement pieces I needed to saw, so I did that first, trying out my new drill press set-up.  There were some complaints in the reviews I read prior to purchase about its accuracy, but I had no issue, maybe because of how I used it. I put the piece down, and pulled the lever down to make sure the bit was going where I wanted it. Then I turned the Dremel on and pulled it down again, and it went right to the same spot. No problems. Since this is what I wanted it for, I think it should be fine. No holes in fingers this week!

I spent a good 6 hours, minus breaks, out in the shop today. I sawed, filed, sanded, and then sawed, filed, and sanded some more. By the time I was starting to get tired (and my back starting to complain), I only had a few more pieces to work on, and it seemed like a worthy goal to finish all the sawing and sanding today. And I felt good because I was making real progress.

The time consuming part was fitting the pieces within each other. That took a lot of filing and finessing, but eventually I got there.

I decided I was overdue for a shower and dinner, so I put off assembly of all the parts for another day, with the exception of the last pair, which I put right into the main piece. The rest (on the right) are superglued to each other and will need to be cleaned up with an Exacto to get the excess glue and wax paper off before I can put them into the main piece. Because I dry fitted all of the pieces as I went, before I moved on to the next, they should drop right in. There’s one that’s questionable; it broke when I put the center piece in, so I fudged it and glued the works together. That could come back to haunt me, in which case, I will likely have to resaw both pieces, now that they’re glued together. We’ll see.

All in all, it was a very productive day. I got more done than I expected to, and it went relatively smoothly. That’s two work days in succession that I’ve left the shop feeling good instead of beaten. Things are looking up. I see my work, and know where every single error is; and I know I have miles to go before I approach competent. But I am improving, and that’s what matters.