GET INLAID

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.

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…”

A few new goodies arrived this week. First, my new books about wood. If I’m going to be subject to its whims and moods, it would probably behoove me to learn something about it. My dogter is interested in them as well, but I told her I have dibs on reading them first.

My little box of wood, which I got via eBay for $5 and shipping, is delightful. It’s mostly cocobolo, with what might be a little mahogany, (I should check one of those books, eh?), and some birds-eye maple. Some of it is beveled, which is groovy. I’m going to have a really nice collection of inlaid paperweights if I keep this up.

And today, my shell came, all the way from Taiwan. The 11-year-old in me really digs getting mail from Taiwan, covered in Chinese characters and official customs stamps and all that. And better yet, it was a ganga.  100g each of gold and black MOP, for $9 per lot and totally reasonable shipping. That’s a little over 3 oz. of each. Gold usually goes for about $19-30 an ounce, black for $30-50 an ounce. I’m happy with what I got. The gold is as good as what I already had, also bought from another seller on eBay, and I haven’t used black before, so we’ll see how it shines up once I sand it. It has nice colors in it; I can tell that much already.

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!