wood inlay template making.....

[Dennis Peacock]

OK.....so I'm new at doing wood inlay. I'm ready to learn more. I need to make a custom inlay pattern of a musical note and I am wondering just how to size the inaly pattern to get the correct size of musical note I need for this up and coming project? My inlay router guide is .56" with the ring on and is .31" without the ring on the guide. If I wanted something like the stem on a musical note to be 1/8" wide, would the pattern need to be .56" plus 1/8" or .69" ????

How do YOU size your inlay patterns to get what you want in your inlay work?

[Jamie Buxton]

Bill, I presume you're using a 1/8" diameter bit, right? If not, the answers change.
Say you made a slot in your template which was exactly .56" wide. You could drop the .56" template guide in that slot, and there would be no side-to-side wiggle. Drive the router up and down the slot, and you've cut a slot on your work surface that is 1/8" wide. If you did as you said, and made the template slot .69" wide, your slot in the work surface would be .25" wide.
With your guides and the 1/8" bit, the template edge should be 7/32" outside the outside edges of the cuts you want to make in the work surface.