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!