GET INLAID

So after 2 days of decompressing over the long weekend, I went out into the shop. Given how things turned out, perhaps I had a subtle premonition that made shop avoidance a matter of clairvoyance rather than laziness.

I started sawing with the recon stone, called Rhodonite. It saws and feels like thick plastic, which is nice and homogenous. But it also is prone to cracking and chipping, which I was not expecting. It cracked along lines I couldn’t even see, on pieces that weren’t especially vulnerable, like on this big flower. There is no discernable “grain” in this stuff, but it certainly had its weak spots, and there seems to be no way to anticipate them.

So I glued another pattern onto another piece and salvaged what I could from the broken one, which was actually a combo of several contiguous pieces that would now be somewhat less contiguous.

I moved on to purpleheart wood, which was just one piece and it sawed uneventfully. It was the last piece to do so. I moved on to the paua, which I was using for the flower stems. It did not take long for me to remember why I don’t like paua. Actually, I love the look of paua, to a degree that borders on mania. But working with it is a much different story. It is brittle and riddled with wormholes, which makes it crack and chip with alarming and catastrophic frequency, and in places you’re not really expecting it.

It did not help that the design I chose had very slender pieces to saw. I’d be going along fine, and then it would break at the very last second, wasting all the sawing until that point. I would always hear it before I saw it, and I’m sorry to say I learned that sound well in the course of a day’s sawing. But undaunted, I reglued patterns to pieces and kept trying until I was down to my last piece of paua. Here it is. This one didn’t make it, either.

Ultimately, I dug through my green abalone to find a piece that would pass for paua, and was lucky enough to do so, and stuck 2 stems to it, and went to work on the pink mussel.

The pink mussel was easy to saw, however the piece I was sawing was challenging, in that it had several long skinny bits sticking out the bottom. The first one wasn’t bad, but I broke some of the delicate pieces off while cutting the others. So I tried it again, and I was so proud that I got the long skinny piece cut without breaking it, even though I’d broken one of the others. I was nearly done with the piece when I must’ve bumped it, and I heard the tell-tale “crack.” So much for my pride and joy. I decided I was going to get it right, though, and put another pattern on some more pink mussel.

When the pattern had dried, I put a layer of superglue on the opposite side, trying to reinforce it so that when I sawed it might hold together better and protect the most slender pieces.

I got that one done even better, only to break the long piece at the last second again. I decided the design would look fine with the shorter bits, and would also be easier to rout that way. So began the slippery slope into what was not so much an inlay plate as a mosaic of small broken pieces.

I started gluing the parts together on the cabinet scraper, and managed to glue my fingers rather painfully to it. It took a lot of superglue remover to get myself free, and it was unpleasant until I did. I left a little skin on there, I’m pretty sure.

I finally got my fingers removed and the pieces glued on, and I was not happy with the results, or the many broken pieces. I decided to redesign the design on the spot and came up with what you see below, and decided almost immediately that it was crap.

I was at my wits end. I wasn’t going to saw those stems for the umpteenth time, only to have them break again. I wasn’t happy with the curved strips. The project was a complete bust.

Attempting to salvage something, anything, I scraped off what I could, and ended up putting this on a small scrap of cocobolo, just so that I had something to show for the day, but it is hardly what one would call an artistic triumph.

This picture sums up the day, really. On the left, you see what I ended up with. On the right you see the design I intended to do, and beyond that, the debris field of the stuff I scrapped. I am pretty disgusted, I have to say.

At this point, I am very seriously considering walking away from inlay, before I misspend another cent on tools and shell. The fact of the matter is, I’m not progressing. My work is consistently mediocre and uneven, and I wouldn’t trust myself within 50 feet of an actual guitar, even a cheapie. If I were seeing improvement in my skills and product, I could see the benefit of hanging in, but I’m not. And if I cannot realize the designs I want to do, what is the point, exactly? At this point, I’ve sunk a ton of money into a hobby I cannot see myself ever being more than sub-average at, not even good enough to do the one project that started all this. I should’ve spent my $300 and gotten the hummingbird done by a pro last October. Financially, I’d be much better off at this point, and I’d have my hummingbird. I don’t even want to think about what I’ve spent on “tuition” as I’ve been trying to learn this.

I’m going to have to take a break and decide what’s next: get back on the horse that has thrown me more than a few times, or organize an eBay auction? I just don’t know, but I’m not feeling at all positive about my prospects as an inlay artist.