Inlay with difficult pieces

[Harvey Pascoe]

Don't you have a problem with the round blade leaving huge kerfs? The blades I used is so small I have to hold them with tweezers!

[george wilson]

You think you are bad,I inlay my signature into mine. I prefer to use a 1/32" bit in my drill press because I can see what I'm doing better than with a Dremel router. I also use the Stewmac down cutting bits that don't fuzz up the line.

My drill press is an old 1964 Craftsman I bought new,but it has the optional high speed attachment that goes 10,000 rpm,which you really need for cutters that small. The sharp corners get cut out by hand with very narrow chisels I make.

Some time ago,I saw an imported guitar that had a bunch of very thin,tapering elements in its headstock. They were a lot thinner than yours,and there were MANY pieces. They had done it by inlaying a sheet of pearl and masking off the "inlay" and spraying everything black. I thought the best part was that you could not(for the time being) see the outline of the large pearl sheet!!!!

I think Gibson also does that now also. Inlaying a block of pearl,and masking the name off. Most likely by silk screening it!!

Anyway,doing this type of difficult inlay is how ambitious young men,and old fools torture themselves. Probably 99.9% of customers out there never look closely at it,or give it any thought,do you think??? Yet,we keep on.

[John Coloccia]

Harry: Actually, the reason I started this thread wasn't about the inlay itself. When I'm trying, I can do that pretty well. It was more how to hold and mark the pieces. I just included the actual inlaying for giggles. The technique you used is a pretty standard Marquetry technique. You can do quite elaborate patterns using that technique. You do some nice work.

[george wilson]

I sometimes glue mine down in LITTLE spots with super glue,trace them GENTLY with a sharp knife,or point,and carefully pop the pieces loose. Then,rout them.

[John Coloccia]

You think you are bad,I inlay my signature into mine. I prefer to use a 1/32" bit in my drill press because I can see what I'm doing better than with a Dremel router. I also use the Stewmac down cutting bits that don't fuzz up the line.

My drill press is an old 1964 Craftsman I bought new,but it has the optional high speed attachment that goes 10,000 rpm,which you really need for cutters that small. The sharp corners get cut out by hand with very narrow chisels I make.

Some time ago,I saw an imported guitar that had a bunch of very thin,tapering elements in its headstock. They were a lot thinner than yours,and there were MANY pieces. They had done it by inlaying a sheet of pearl and masking off the "inlay" and spraying everything black. I thought the best part was that you could not(for the time being) see the outline of the large pearl sheet!!!!

I think Gibson also does that now also. Inlaying a block of pearl,and masking the name off. Most likely by silk screening it!!

Well, that's certainly easier than actually cutting anything, isn't it? LOL.

re: drill press work
So you must inlay the headstock veneer before gluing it on, and then just move the veneer around, like a George powered mill table. I'd never thought of that. It sounds like something I'd like to try. Maybe I'll pickup the dremel "drill press" attachment and try it. The more I think about it, the more I think this is a good way to do it. I'd really like to get much better at inlay work. It's always been a weakness in my skill set. Maybe this will help.

I still think that using one of those high speed air turbine powered cutters is going to be the ultimate inlay tool. I'm really surprised that no one's latched on to that yet.

[Bryan Morgan]

Great tutorial! Thanks John! I'm saving this as a PDF

[Dave MacArthur]

Great thread, thanks!
I've only done the task once on a guitar, but I also double-side taped my pieces down. I believe I sprayed them also to mark the cut outs, then used x-acto knife to cut the edges, then a dremel with router base to waste out the material. But all the discussion above with George and Harvey had me remembering how difficult it was to match the mortise to the inlay due to the mill size--I remember being very glad my background wood was solid black!

I just went to look at my job, and it's nowhere near as fine as yours. I also used wood-dust with epoxy to fill any small voids. It worked great on the solid black ebony fretboard, but is more noticeable on the walnut headstock.
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I actually had planned on inlaying my name in a script inside the "banner" of mother of pearl... in "Feanorian", the elven writing used in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Never got around to it, and can't even remember what material I was going to use. I was kind of into Tolkien when I built this thing in my teens heh.

Got me thinking, I used to actually make "downhill skateboards", basically a solid oak plank, and inlay guy's initials in the boards for them. That was one of my high-school woodworking "businesses" I used to do to pay for flight lessons, along with cheese platters and cutting boards. Your post got me thinking I may have one laying around in the shop, so I just went out and found it, waaay back under a pile of balusters.
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WOW, I remember exactly what your post above is talking about now, the smallest bit I had for my dremel router setup was way too large for my sharp corners... Looking at it now, it's pretty sloppy, and I just filled in with wood-dust filler. The mother of pearl part is actually a "D" in Feanorian, and the rest was supposed to be an Elven leaf (brazilian rosewood) with black ebony lightning bolts coming from it... Apparently this was my "Crest" I made up for myself when I was 16

Not too bad for a 16 year old, but nowhere near your work! Still, I sold a lot of monogrammed skateboards at $15 a letter, and it did pay for my pilot's license!

Glad to read your excellent post, it brought back a lot of memories, and I'll be referring to it soon--planning on trying my hand at an acoustic in the next year.

[John Coloccia]

I just strung it up tonight, Dave



If you can believe it, the intonations is absolutely dead nuts. I've never had that happen before. Dumb luck as I didn't even check the position of the saddles before installing the bridge.

Chambered alder body, with a carved spruce top. The neck is honduran mahogany, and the fingerboard is bolivian rosewood. It's the first time I'm trying bolivian...I happened to find a particularly nice piece at Woodcraft. I've gone through several prototypes. I think I finally nailed it with this one, although I botched the neck angle. I tried to get cute to see just how close I could get the bridge to the top... uhm, well the action is perfect and the bridge is resting directly ON the top on the treble side. Woops. I still haven't really drop the slots in the bridge yet, so there's plenty of room to play, but I cut this one a bit closer than I'd really intended. I'm still not exactly sure why I ended up off. I did decide to do a 3/16" fingerboard instead of a 1/4". Maybe I didn't take that into account. Anyhow, I got away with it without having to do something dumb like recess the bridge. I think I'll add 1 degree....LOL. All that's left is carving the neck heal and some sanding, and then finish.

By the way, I think your inlays are much neater than mine, not the other way around.

[Harvey Pascoe]

Dave, that ribbon banner looks great but I can see your boo-boo repairs. The great problem is in getting the fill color so that it doesn't stand out. You might want to try artists water colors and a very fine brush. Paint pigment can stand out against the wood after finishing, particularly lacquer, so what I do is use a wash, a watered down color rather than pure pigment, which will stand out even if the color is exact. I do several wash coats over the fill, gradually bringing the color up to matching. Takes like maybe 15 minutes to do it and blend it in. With a bit of experience in mixing colors, the job goes much faster and I end up with invisible fixes.

[Dave MacArthur]

Harvey, thanks, that's a good idea! I think I just made some dust, mixed with epoxy, and hoped, but your way sounds much better.

John, that's a beauty! Glad the bridge worked for you, getting good action so it plays as nice as it looks can be hard--I recall working on those frets and string height for weeks to get rid of a few errant string buzzes. And trust me, if my phone camera were better you'd be able to see that your inlay is nicer! That delicate JC is so thin, really difficult to fit. By the way, I do think that logo and it's particular curves is just fantastic looking, a really nice graphic design. Something to be proud of for sure.

I hope you try that air turbine and see how it works. I don't currently have a fine router for inlay, and was thinking I should get the dremel setup with that base (or whatever the best setup is). I really like inlay, a small piece here and there in a design, so your continued thoughts on what works "the best" are appreciated.

[Harvey Pascoe]

Well, Dave, if you did that strictly by hand, that is pretty darn good. Years ago I played around with Japanese block printing which uses extremely fine carved wood blocks which is not unlike inlay. I ran into people who do inlays like that with ease and it was all because of practice and technique. And it was amazing how fast they could do it. And they had some pretty fine hand tools, many of them self-made. Rather than scrapping the whole piece if they made a mistake, they would inlay a small piece of wood at the point of error and then recarve that.

Whether you use a knife or a Dremel or whatever, learning how to control the implement is the key. I would have to disagree with John that the turbine is going to solve all problems as he still has a rotary tool in hand and he still has to learn how to control it and that, I think, is tougher than controlling carving tools. Even in using the double bevel method with scroll saw, there is still a learning curve requiring lots of practice.

I think the bottom line is, choose a method and then stick with it until you get it perfected. Jumping from one to another will just take up more of your time, result in high expenditure and likely lead to disappointment

[george wilson]

Another thing you can do is to lightly glue the pearl pieces on top of the veneer,and drill a tiny hole through both layers. Then,using a fine jeweler's saw blade(6/0,or so),saw through both layers. Tilting the blade at a slight angle as you saw will cause a snug fit when you finish up,and slip fit the pearl down into the wood. This is called marquetry,and is how I made this inlaid 17th.C. guitar,and some others I never photographed.

The big challenge for me was controlling the weight of the saw. I had to make a saw with a 20" deep throat from yew wood. Using a 6/0 jeweler's saw blade,the slightest twist,and the blade would pop. The saw frame had to be deep enough to encompass the whole body of the guitar. The general public was just a few feet away from my shoulder while I was making this guitar,which took getting used to,as I was in the museum's Musical Instrument Maker's Shop at the time.

This is not pearl,obviously,but the same method applies. Actually,pearl would be easier as it is rigid enough to not fall apart,and a logo would be very small compared to this guitar back. To keep the thin wood veneer from just falling apart,I had glued a layer of vellum type tracing paper onto each layer of veneer. Caslon Vidalon is what was used. It is a very tough,vellum like tracing paper. After the white and brown layers were sawn out,slip fitted together,and glued to a substrate,the tracing paper was sanded off. Without this paper,where the veneer elements were cross grained,they would have broken to pieces and made a helpless mess of pieces. There are other vellum tracing papers available that are also tough and thin. Don't try mylar.

[John Coloccia]

Forget about cutting it out....what I don't understand is how you keep those piece from breaking? Even if I managed to somehow cut it out, it seems like they would break on me just trying to separate them. Egads!

[george wilson]

Read again,John,I did a bunch of editing. The tracing paper kept the whole mess from falling apart. Needless to say,it was a very delicate process.

[Dan Hintz]

Actually, there's a guy I'm working with now and we are experimenting with laser cutting pearl. At a minimum, I may have him laser my headstocks, even if I still cut the MOP by hand. Maybe I'll start ordering the logo too. I don't mind having a machine cut logo. Honestly, I think it's a very poor use of my time. I'm always open to making things better

When I first read this thread, all I could think of was "Man, it would be soooo much faster to laser the headstock and pearl... assembly would take 2-3 minutes followed by a sanding!". Glad to know you're heading down that road.