Day 9 - Inlay Work, Part 4

Inlays eat up a lot of time, what can I say. Course, I haven't put a straight 10 hours in and cranked the whole thing out, it's been a couple hours here and there. I bet I could do this pretty quickly if I had everything planned out and all the materials on hand. Today, I tried my hand at routing the cavities. This is supposed to be the hard part.

So start off with a good sharp scribe and the inlay pieces cut out, hold down (or lightly glue) the inlays to the top of the fretboard. I held down, it turned out fine. Then scribe a good healthy line around the outside of the inlay. I say healthy because when you get to the next step it's important to have a little depth to the line and it's a pain to have to reposition an inlay to redo it.

Take a regular old piece of white chalk and color in all the lines. wipe the top of the fretboard relatively clean. This will leave a nice sharp white line outlining the inlay.

I popped 50 bucks for the precision dremel router base from StewMac. Boy is this thing nice. It's well worth it if you're doing some intricate inlay work. I bought a pack of high speed steel 1/32" straight flute routers which are about $2 each, and one carbide down cut bit at $17 each for shits and giggles to compare the two. I haven't tried the high dollar bit yet, but so far the HSS bits work just fine and I'm not as afraid to smoke them, because what's two bucks? I've gotten very nice clean edges with these. Maybe it's a different story in ebony...

Here's a pic of the leaf / branch at the end and its associated cavity. Beautiful.

And here's everything in place waiting for glue. Yeah, there are some gaps and mistakes. Here's a neat trick for ya. Do the routing on a piece of paper and save the sawdust. Put all the sawdust in an envelope at the end. Now when you glue it all together, mix the sawdust in with the epoxy. It will fill in the gaps and no one will be the wiser. Especially after you stain the whole fretboard dark brown or black. Be sure to write 'rosewood' on the envelope in case the DEA raids your house because rosewood sawdust is similar in appearance to heroin...

I'll try to give a field report on my thoughts of HSS router bits vs. carbide at some point. G'Night!

Day 8 - Inlay Work, Part 3

More sitting around, watching movies (Live Free or Die Hard) and cutting out inlays... Lovely, yes? So I've got some more flavors of abalone coming my way to do the rose in the middle. We're looking at gold, green, and figured white. Till they show up, I might start routing and gluing in the two end pieces. This is fun!

Day 7 - Inlay Work Part 2

Lots and lots of patience and work to do inlays. Fortunately when one is not allowed to move, I don't feel guilty about sitting here, watching stuff on Hulu and cutting mother of pearl pieces at my computer desk err... work bench. Anyway, here's some more close up work shots. I hope I can find the charger for my camera because I'm down to one battery and it's like 5 years old and I don't want to buy a new camera because I can't locate chargers... All right, nuff of that, here's some good action shots:

Action shot showing my setup with a jeweler's saw cutting out a section of vine with a thorn in it. I just draw those in with a pencil freehand and split the line with the saw. Pretty stinkin' easy.

Here we are in the middle of a cut. That saw can turn AMAZINGLY sharp corners. All you have to do is keep moving it up and down and rotate the workpiece slowly and it rotates in one spot.

Here's a piece of vine cut out. Don't sneeze.

And this is like 5 separate pieces cut out and laid end to end to create a vine. Leaves will come next. Two things I'm still debating. I've got some really pretty green abalone coming for the rose in the center. I don't know if I should do all white leaves or half and half. Also, I could file the ends so they fit together perfectly, or I could leave them slightly disjointed for a more wild effect. I think I actually like the disjointed look better. Either way, this fretboard will have a ton of time and work (and $$$) invested in it and will look sexy as hell when it's done.

Over and out for the night, guys, Hopefully Dio is watching us from above (or below...)