Sand Shading question

[Doug Shepard]

I've never done sand shading but got to wondering about something yesterday. If you use sand shading to darken an edge of something to be inlaid do you lose the sand shading when you sand or scrape it flush after glue-up ?? Does the heat darken the edge through the edges or just on the top and bottom surfaces? Could you use this with shopmade veneer say 1/16 and inlaid say 1/64" proud? Or would you lose all the shading by leveling it? Just kicking ideas around for a project down the road a bit.

[Chris Padilla]

Doug,

I've never done this but that rarely stops me from offering an opinion! ;)

I think it might depend on how long the contact is with the wood as to how "deep" the darkening process goes. It may depend on the temperature, the wood species, the moisture content. I think you may be getting the idea that you may need to experiment a bit on some surplus wood from your project to ensure you get the results you want.

[jerry cousins]

you'll need to know the properties of the wood regarding how much to darken and what you will lose in sanding - which you definitely do. so the shading has to be darker than what you will get at the end. and some woods (especially the less dense species) cannot take too much heat - the wood actually chars/burns and you lose the edge. so i would play around with chips.

if your wood is proud of the finished surface by very much it is likely that when it is leveled most of the shading will be gone.

jerry

[Doug Shepard]

Yeah I think I need to approach this a bit differently than my normal solid wood inlay method which is to leave it quite a bit proud for flushing up later. Time to pick up some silica sand and do soe experimenting. Thanks guys.