GET INLAID

I had another good sawing day today, and finished all the sawing for my goldfish without having to resaw a single piece, which is unprecedented for me. Two good weekends of sawing in a row? I hardly know how to act. But I am elated.

I think my new and improved Zen attitude toward the process has helped. The very thin lines I managed on this project’s pattern also have helped immensely. This is something I learned before, but apparently I needed a reminder.

I would saw a piece, fit it with the ones already sawn, and clap with glee when it fit just so. There is hope for me yet!

Let me tell you about today’s biggest sawing victory. Remember that piece that was clamped?

It is actually two pieces of shell (well, three, but the third was just a spare to keep thickness consistent and not part of the pattern.) I was experimenting with a method I learned in the Patterson book.  He suggested it, as I recall, for cutting multiples of the same piece, and also for cutting fitted adjoining pieces. The idea is that you glue two pieces of shell together with white glue (which is what Patterson recommends, and which I’ve adopted as well), putting the pattern on top, saw, and then soak them in water and separate them later. The result is two perfectly interlocking pieces because they shared the same sawing line.

So I decided to give it a try for the fish’s dorsal fin. The design is pretty complicated, sawing-wise, with all the ups and downs.

I knew that it was unlikely that I would be able to saw with the kind of precision needed to get them to line up over such a long stretch, and I wanted to use two colors of shell: gold MOP for the main fin and black for the edge piece.

So I found a piece of gold MOP of suitable size, put an appropriately sized piece of the black over it, and, realizing that a sudden change of thickness in shell might lead to extra broken saw blades and make the edge of the smaller piece vulnerable to chipping, I added another piece of black and clamped the works together.

I sawed that piece second today, just so I could warm up, but I wanted to do it early while my concentration and my hands were still fresh. My plan was to cut down the middle of the piece first, leaving two hefty sides for cutting the remainder out. More shell equals less breakage, I’ve learned, and it gives me something to hold on to.

The added bonus to doing it this way is that if you find that the ambition of the drawing was beyond your sawing skill level, as I did, you can make changes to it on the fly and not worry about it. Unless you chip it, there is no way these pieces won’t fit together, but if you were doing two separate pieces you’d have a hard time winging a change and still get them to match. As you can see in this picture, I made adjustments and expanded the width of some of the peaks to make it easier on myself while still being faithful to the spirit of the design.

I decided to dig out my #2 blades (I usually use #3) to make the kerf between the two pieces as small as possible. I’d bought them awhile back, thinking they’d help me be more accurate, but that seems to be more a matter of skill than tool; I gave up on them before because they’d break too often, but I thought they’d be good for this purpose. I dumped the whole dozen out on the bench and made peace with the probability that I would use all 12 before I started sawing. And I didn’t get stressed when they broke, because the saw blade is already broken. (Get me! So Zen!)

I did get a little stressed when one broke and ricocheted off my left ring finger with enough force to draw blood, but it didn’t bleed much and I kept going. I also sawed a wee bit into my left middle finger, but no blood. We call that a good day in the shop. It’s been a bad weekend for me, safety-wise. I wrangled with a mesquite branch yesterday and lost, with a profusely bleeding head scratch and several nasty scratches down my back as well. But it got me out of a lot of the remainder of the yardening and housework today; Scott didn’t want me hurting myself…anymore. I didn’t tell him about the saw issues.

Here you can see the two levels of shell.

And here is the worst of the sawing on this piece, done, and everything intact.

That’s the other secret bonus I didn’t really think about of doing this layered shell method. You’ve got 2 layers of shell and some Elmer’s glue in betwixt, making the entirety of what you’re sawing so much stronger. Yeah, it takes more elbow grease to saw through it, but it’s not difficult. That extra strength came in very handy when I finished the top fin piece. A piece this slender would’ve broken 3 times as I cut it, and I would’ve ended up doing it over and over and over had it been a single thickness of shell. I might consider it for vulnerable pieces in general in the future. As it was, once was the charm, though it did break in the water bath I had it sitting in to separate the shells. However, it’s still totally usable, so no problem. (Athena reminded me that breakage is not necessarily a tragedy—thanks Ath!) I set aside the broken off piece for safety and left the rest in the bath.

Then I put together what I had in the box, and though this picture shows gaps, because I didn’t glue any of it down and it moves when I touch it, it actually all fits nearly perfectly. I’m quite stunned. And giddy. When I slid that little front fin piece (#18) into the slot in the front, and it went right where it was supposed to, I was grinning.

I will drop these pieces into a bath to get the paper off prior to gluing them all together, so I can see what I’ve got. The pieces are unique enough that I won’t confuse them without their labels. Once the bathing beauties have relinquished their paper patterns and each other, in the case of the double-layer pieces, I will be able to glue them into a single plate. And then it’ll be routing time.

I am so pleased at how this came together this time, and so glad I backtracked to a simpler design. I stepped back to move forward and it’s paying off. The fact that I was invested in this little fishy has helped, too. When I was doing some of those practice geometric pieces, I wasn’t excited about all of them. I think that extra enthusiasm keeps you focused and persistent.

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.

Friday night when I got home from open mic, I pulled into the garage and thought I’d finish taking the design off the alder. Breaking all the rules of knife usage, I pulled the blade toward me and ended up using my middle fingertip as a stop. Doh! You can see where I superglued it. Superglue fixes everything! And the band-aid? That would be where I sawed myself cutting out a piece of purpleheart for project #9. The blade broke through the last bit of wood and finished its downward trajectory right across my finger.

Truly, a person like myself has no business using tools. And the razorblade cut made guitar impossible for the rest of the weekend. I kill me. Or I might, given enough time and a handful of tools.

Anyway…

I went out Saturday morning to rout. There are no pictures of the process, as I didn’t have a single set of juiced-up batteries. I routed the alder, and had a few booboos. When I was done, I found that the piece dropped right in! Bonus, right? Only it dropped right in because it was way too oversized. Bad news dude, especially in a wood as light as alder.

Which is how I ended up routing a new piece out of a scarp of cocobolo. Amazingly, I was able to rout the straight lines beautifully on 5 of the 6 sides. I don’t know what the hell happened on the 6th side, but I do know that if I’m going to overshoot on routing, it’s going to be in that lower right-hand side of a design; it’s happened over and over again. I don’t know what the issue is: visual? Mental block?

Visual is a real probability, and I was really frustrated this time around about not being able to see around the metal Stew-Mac router base. I am very seriously considering (read: in my mind, it’s already bought) the clear-based Luthier’s Mercantile router base.   It’s spendy, almost 3x the cost of the Stew-Mac one. But I am already visually impaired; the opaque metal base only makes things worse. I tell myself that I’ll earn that money back on the wood I’m NOT throwing into the scrap pile, and on the time I will not waste doing everything twice. If I were mechanically inclined, and adequately tooled, I’d make my own. However, those without skills pay for our lack, as I will.

In any case, 5/6th brilliantly routed still qualifies as great improvement, and I can be proud of that. Only 16% of my routing sucked this time. I carefully saved the sawdust from routing, and filled it in with that and some superglue. I used the medium this time. I did the bulk of the routing with the 1/8” bit, and then cleaned up with the 1/32”. I let it sit the rest of the day and overnight so I could sand Sunday.

After sanding with 80-grit, I vacuumed up all the dust and found I had pits where there wasn’t enough superglue. No doubt that’s where the biggest gaps were.

I filled it, let it dry, and sanded it. This of course put more dust in the glue, which I dutifully picked out, reglued, and let dry. This is how a 25-minute sanding job becomes an all-day project. If I could figure out how to keep the sawdust out of the glue when I sand it, I would be a hap-hap-happy woman. Is it too warm in the shop, and even glue that seems cured is still flexible enough? I don’t know. Maybe I need to consider epoxy. Does it dry harder? The sawdust also gets into the pores of the wood, and while it takes no effort to get it into the pores, no effort I’ve made to get it out seems to work. I’ve used water and elbow grease, but it doesn’t get it all. I suppose I could invest in only ebony and rosewood ground wood, as it has smaller pores, and is likely what I’d be working on, guitar-wise. It’s a shame; cocbolo is so pretty.

I finished it up, got it as clean as I could, and put a good coat of Tung oil on it, and let it dry overnight. Here she is:

You can see the fillerama on the right side (even if I squint, I can’t pass it off as a possible grain line), but I think the routing along the other 5 sides looks pretty good. I’m quite pleased; which only makes the bad one that much more annoying. Not a bad result, overall, but not the inlay result of my dreams. My mental images outstrip my skill by miles and miles. I need to remind myself that my expectations at this point in the process are what are unreasonable, rather than the results I’m getting.

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.