GET INLAID

…I guess I did give up, for awhile.  Almost a year.  I was frustrated because I wasn’t making any progress, and decided to just take a break until I felt differently.  But I’ve been thinking about it lately and considering giving it another try.  Tonight (on this auspicious day, no less!) I cleaned off my workbench, and glued patterns to shell.  12 pieces, a simple geometric design with lots of curves.

Wish me luck!

Whoa!  My recent abandonment of this here blog is worse than I thought.  I’ve been kind of on a semi-voluntary hiatus from inlay.  It started because I was not particularly happy with my hand-traced design drawing last time.  The lines were too thick.  I coveted Athena’s beautifully computer-rendered patterns, but not being well versed in the graphics-fu, I subcontracted the work out to the hubby, who lives to play with drawings on his Wacom pad and Corel Draw program, figuring I could spend years learning the software well enough to get what I wanted out of it.

And while he readily agreed to my little project, it seems my sub wasn’t terribly keen on getting started on the work, and the weeks wore on.  Eventually, I just gave up hope, got out my light table and asked him for the hardest pencil he had, and went to work on creating my design in the low-tech way.  I don’t have a terribly steady hand, though, and I’m convinced that a good pattern goes a long way to creating a good inlay, so I traced and erased and traced some more.  However, I discovered when I went to make photocopies that the lead had smudged from the erasures as well as dragging my hand through it.  I ended up having to do it several more times prior to it being acceptable, although I still think the lines are too thick.  The problem is that a pen would give me a thinner line, but my tracing skills aren’t pen-worthy.  It’s hard to keep a sharp line with a pencil, though.  But I need to get back into the shop.  I miss it.

My next design is one based on the Northwestern Native American hummingbird below that I found via a Google image search.  I’m only doing the bird at this point.  It’s only 40 some pieces, but they are very tiny and some of them are very thin.  It’s definitely going to be a challenge for me, a significant one.  But I need to practice working on that scale if I ever hope to be able to work on guitar fingerboards, so now is as good a time as any. 

Shell selection will be key, as well, and I need to spend some time on that and start gluing patterns to shell.  I hope to at least get that much done this weekend, with sawing to start the weekend after.

An overdue post As you may have noticed, this blog has become less process-oriented and more show-and-tell with finished projects, which means fewer posts. I have found that there’s very little I have left to say about process. It’s the same process every time, with, the same challenges, and I’m still learning and struggling with the same things. So we’ll just stipulate that. The rest can be covered in the final photos and a brief discussion of the issues therein.

Project #12 was a daffodil design from a book Athena sent me. It’s appropriate that it’s project #12, because I’ve been doing this a year now, and it has worked out to about a project a month, worked on primarily during weekends. On one hand, I thought I’d have progressed further than I have; on the other hand, I’ve learned a lot and accomplished quite a bit, and have found a hobby I enjoy (even with the frustrations), even if it’s another year or more before I will even consider doing a real, live, playable guitar. I could’ve gotten off a lot cheaper having a professional do my hummingbird in the first place, and don’t think I don’t ponder that frequently. However, as I told my dad, it keeps me off the streets.

Here’s the daffodil before engraving. It’s made of MOP, gold MOP and recon malachite in bocote.

There were a few challenges. I’m still having trouble with the lines of my patterns being too thick, resulting in my undercutting the pieces so much that it throws the entire design off when I try to put it together. I ended up recutting most of this design, leaving a thin edge of black pattern, and it went a lot better. I’m going to be giving my next design to the hubby to put in Corel and thin the lines for me; it’s just not happening with pencil tracings or line drawings for me right now, and I know that the couple of times I had really thin lines, I did better. That said, despite many, many saw blades giving their lives to actualize this design, with all its crenellated pieces (damnable nature!), I was pleased by my improved accuracy in sawing.

Still having a hell of a time with routing, and this design is filler city. Complicating matters was a last-minute switch from using black epoxy to superglue. That was a wood problem. The piece of bocote I had was very, very dark, but when I started routing it, the sawdust was bright yellow. Doh! All my wood knowledge is learned on the job. As you can see from the photos, sanding revealed light and dark streaks in a wood that was as dark as ebony when I started. It’s pretty as it is, but I could’ve saved myself the hassle and fumes of messing with epoxy I ended up peeling off later if I’d realized it was going to go that way. Plus, it was nigh on impossible to hide any mistakes. Now I know why Grit Laskin always works in ebony. It’s so forgiving.

Visibility and light is my greatest problem in routing. The goggles, they do nothing, when I need to be that close to the work and my OptiVisor just gets in my way.  The metal base of the Stew-Mac router base is limiting and any light I have is blocked by the Dremel itself. Maybe this would work for me. I’ll try it for $20; it’s a damn sight cheaper than the other option.  I have been holding off buying the $140 Luthier’s Mercantile clear base, because it’s $140, (almost 3 times what I paid for the Stew-Mac one) but I may have to bite the bullet.  I feel like I’ve mostly licked my router-control issues, but if I can’t see, I can’t rout accurately. It’s as simple as that.

I did just a little bit of engraving to define the center of the daffodil and left it at that. It turned out all right, I think. I didn’t want to go crazy; the engraver likes to slip, and I didn’t want to push my luck. Despite the aforementioned issues, I’m pleased with the way it turned out. Fortunately, I’m not cursed with perfectionism.

In other news, when I was in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, I ended up buying some dyed abalone from a jewelry vendor in Ghirardelli Square. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the hematite accent beads he was showing off were going to end up in my bead collection after I stripped all the findings from the large pieces of shell, which I intended to saw into smaller pieces of shell.  I got a necklace and a pair of earrings, a dozen large pieces of shell, for $20. That’s a ganga.

Blue is hard to do in shell, normally. I have some blue recon stone, but recon stone just doesn’t shine up like shell does, and I miss the fire. I have no idea how deep the dye goes, and how much sanding it’ll take. We’ll see, but maybe I’ll get lucky. If it doesn’t work, I’ll keep trying. Maybe a blue-stained wood. At least wood will take on a chatoyance with an oil finish that’s closer to shell than recon stone.

He’s finished!  You can click the pictures to access the original-size versions.  I had hoped to get the sanding done tonight, but just kept going.  The "rhinestones" in the glasses are engraved and filled, and the mouth and nose are just engraved; I wanted it subtle.  The glasses pieces are obvious about where I divided the pieces, but overall it turned out better than I’d dared to hope during the process.  I was sure it was going to be a disaster, but I like him.  I’m giving this to my friend Beth, who is a vet, because she needs a paperweight, and I have already made way too many.

Details on my band saw class Friday here.