[flannr]

I was asked to talk about inlays, so here goes...
There are at least three ways to do inlays:
1. veneer
2. shell as veneer or routed
3. wood routed

Each has its good points and bad points, just like everything else in life. Of the three, I have limited myself to veneer, so I'll talk about that first.

The good - Veneer is a very thin layer of wood. If you get a couple of types of wood that are different in color you can cut a hole in one and a puzzle piece from the other that fits in the hole. Sounds easy, right?
The bad - If you want to do a small area it turns into number three above (wood routed). It's easiest to cover an entire surface, like a tuning head right up to the nut. If you use this to cover the soundboard of the instrument, it will ruin the sound, so it's not a technique you would use for an acoustically active component of the instrument.
How to do it - First you want to get a lot of veneer samples. If you're serious about this there is a website called "certainlywood" that will sell you more veneer than you will ever use for $40. The box will contain a random sampling of woods that are unlabled, so you will have no clue what you are working with, but the selection they sent me was pretty good. Look at my website to see what I've done. Next, you will need masking tape, carbon paper, an acid brush, an xacto knife, some 150 grit sandpaper, 220, 320, 400, 600, and 800, and a sanding block to hold it, some clamps, a good wood glue (I can't remember the kind I use - ask me later), a picture, a scanner, some picture editing software, and a board big enough to cut on.

Scan in the picture you want to replicate. If you want to work from a photo use the carbon paper to make a line drawing copy of it. Keep it as simple as possible for starters. Scan the picture into your computer, and using the photo editing software make it as high contrast as possible. I then start up powerpoint and import the picture, and make multiple images on one page of different sizes. I print this out and check to see which picture is the correct size. Then I go back into powerpoint, copy the right sized picture onto another page over and over until I have a whole page of that one size image. I print this page.

There are a couple of ways to do the next part. One way is to cut the hole first. Take a piece of veneer, and in pencil draw the outline of the part of the instrument you are going to put it on; i.e. the guitar head. Figure out which way the grain should go (usually up and down) and where the picture is going to be (usually the middle). Consider where the tuners are going to come through the background. Cut out one of the paper pictures and use the masking tape to tape it into position. Cut the whole thing out of the background using the picture to guide your cut. It's better to make a dozen cuts with a little pressure than one cut with lots of pressure. Veneer can be very delicate. If the veneer you're cutting tends to shatter, back it with masking tape to help hold it together while you are cutting.

Now you've got a piece of veneer with (let's say) a flower shaped hole in it. Put masking tape across the front of the hole to cover it completely. turn the piece face down.

Now select a piece of veneer that is a contrasting color (let's say it's white). You're going to cut out one petal of your flower. Find a nicely figured place in the veneer, and line up the grain in the right direction for the image. Cut out another paper copy of your picture, and tape it to the white veneer. Cut out the petal. See if it fits where it will go in the hole - you may have to rub an edge on the sandpaper to get it to fit. Stick it in there, face down so it sticks to the tape. Repeat as necessary until the picture is complete.

There are probably some gaps in the picture - hopefully rather small ones. You will want to fill these in. I open my shop vacuum and grab a pinch of sawdust, but you can always make your own sawdust using the sandpaper and the scrap veneer. press the sawdust into the gaps, so it sticks to the tape too, then use an acid brush to brush off the excess.

Sand the surface of the guitar head to receive the veneers with 80 grit sandpaper followed by 150, then 220, then 320. Wash it off with alcohol or thinner and wipe it dry. Use the acid brush to put glue on the head leaving no gaps, and on the back of the veneer pieces. Be liberal.

Carefully position the artwork (that's what it is) on the head, face it with a caul (that's a block of wood that will help apply even pressure without leaving marks) and put as many clamps on it as will fit. I usually manage to get 5 or 6 on there at 100 lbs each. Let it sit for 12 hours. No cheating.

Take the clamps off and carefully peel off the tape. I know it doesn't look as good as you'd hoped, but we aren't done yet. You can use a dremel tool or your xacto knife to cut the background close to the head. Use the sanding block to sand the edges clean (here we go - 80, 150, 220, 320, 400, 600, 800). If you sand flat, you will get a sharp edge, which you can lightly round when you are done. This will only show the background veneer at the edges.

Sand the picture in the direction of the background grain with 150, 220, 320, 400, 600, and 800. Wash it off with thinner.

Now you have to put a finish on it. There are lots of different finishes, and they range from glossy to matt, and easy to difficult. Some are "guitar" finishes, which for some reason cost more than other kinds...What you want to do is match the finish of the rest of your instrument. That usually means high gloss. You can go to the Stewart McDonald website (stewmac dot com) and buy a water based finish that brushes on. It works pretty good, but watch out for brush marks and runs.

You can try this whole process out on a wooden box or even an old board and test your skill before you go the guitar.
I'll address the other two techniques later on.

Let me know if you have questions.

[knight46]

Great post flannr, so with this type the veneer lays on top of the surface and the finnish applied helps to hold it to the guitar. Sort of like decopage? This would make a great sticky, especially with pics.
Thanks

[flannr]

Yes, the veneer is the entire surface of the head - but here's some news for you. When I make a neck, the head is usually composed of 4 pieces of wood all glued together. How else could I get the neck angle and the shape I want? So how do I hide the seems? I put a piece of veneer over the whole thing. Check out your guitar, and you will very likely see that there is a veneer on it already! Since I have to do that anyway, I might as well put a picture in it. It only adds a few hours of work, and the sanding is great exercise.

By the way, WEAR A GOOD DUST MASK WHEN YOU SAND. That stuff can kill you in time, especially if you are dealing with exotic woods, and MOST ESPECIALLY if you are dealing with shell or mother of pearl.

Take care,
Ron

[knight46]

Great advice, thanks Ron.

[eddiez152]

flannr,
Pretty neat post. Thanks for sharing.

[flannr]

Here's another tip. The xacto blade tends to get dull pretty quick, and there's no way you can put an edge on it like the factory did. The fact is though, you only use the point, so when it gets dull, flip it around so it's sharp side up, and sandpaper the dull tip off by dragging it toward you across a piece of sandpaper a few times. This leaves a new sharp tip for you to work with. Good as new.

[Doug]

Originally Posted by flannr

By the way, WEAR A GOOD DUST MASK WHEN YOU SAND. That stuff can kill you in time, especially if you are dealing with exotic woods, and MOST ESPECIALLY if you are dealing with shell or mother of pearl.

Take care,
Ron

Good advice, I once spent about an hour cutting 1/8" veneers from a piece of cocobola on my bandsaw without a mask. I was seriously afraid I was going to die of respiratory failure. That wood is very toxic.

[flannr]

Well, now that you've all made inlays of intricate scenes using veneer over a surface, it's time to move on to the complex stuff...

I first got interested in inlays when I saw a uke that had some fish inlayed into the surface of the soundboard. I looked through all my woodworking catalogs and found all kinds of gizmos to automat the process - but not one of them worked for me. I spent good money to find this out. Grrrr. So I cast around for a good book on the subject and found one. How is it done? Manually of course. The only gizmo that will do the job is a dremel with a routing bit and a routing base, a keen eye, and a steady hand. Here's how it's done - and again, this is just one way to approach it.

You make your drawing, let's say it's a fish: nemo. Nemo has stripes, so this is going to be a bit complex. Again, you scan it in, size it, and print a sheet of as many nemos as there are parts to the final; i.e. a head, an orange stripe, a white, an orange, a white, an orange into the tail - that's at least 7 drawings you're going to want. I'll assume you're working in something thicker than veneer, so you'll need a saw that can make very accurate cuts in curves. There is a hand saw you can get from the XACTO people - a jewelers saw - that takes fine blades and allows for lots of clearance. I use a power scroll saw made by dremel that sells for about $100 for the thicker stuff. If you use the hand saw, you will have to make yourself a little table (I made one that mounts in a vise) with a V cut in the front. You put your work piece over the V and saw through it without having to cut the table itself.

The next steps are similar to the veneer method, but it's almost impossible to use the drawing taped to the piece for a cutting pattern. Instead you use either carbon paper to trace the pattern or you use the xacto blade to scribe the pattern into the wood. If you scribe with the blade, you can put chalk or pencil graphite dust in the scratch to make it more visible. The carbon paper is very hard to see on a darker wood. Now you cut out the pieces, and stick them to masking tape to build your fish. Again, make sure the grain of the wood is going in the right direction for the picture. If you're going to use stain on the pieces of the art, now is the time, but you're going to have to revisit the staining with a paintbrush after the sanding phase. Once you've built the entire fish, you will want to glue it together, and this can be quite tricky. Before you glue it, sand the edges of each piece smooth. A neat look (reminiscent of childrens toys) is to round the top edges a bit. The hard part is clamping this. If the pattern allows you to squeeze it from the sides you can rig a clamp table. It works like this: you take a peice of plywood cut to a rectangle larger than the piece, and attach raised sides to it. Then you make long thin trangles out of wood the same thickness as (or thicker than) the artwork. Put down waxed paper so you don't glue the artwork to the table. Use your acid brush (home dept 25 cents) to paint the edges of the work with glue. Assemble the artwork on the table, and slide the wedges towards each other at the sides, pointy end toward pointy end. As they overlap they will start to push against the artwork, squeezing it together. If you do it right and have anough wedges, you can get it to stay together pretty tightly. You may have to put a weight on top to keep it flat. If you have to fill in gaps - do the saw dust trick from the veneer method.

Once this is set (give it plenty of time) sand the outside egde to give it as smooth a line as possible. The sanding wheel on a dremel is good for this, so is a sanding wheel on a drill press. If you don't believe in power tools, wrap sandpaper around a dowel of the appropriate size and go at it.

Now take the art and put it on top of the receiving surface. Obviously if this is a guitar top, it better not be too thick or you will have to cut a hole through the top to receive it. How thick is a guitar top? Don't think it's uniform, and don't think it's as thick all over as it is at the hole. When I make a uke, I put a reenforcing patch under the hole, so that's always thicker than the rest of the soundboard. When I sand it, I make it as thin as reasonable at the edges to allow for better resonance, so that's the thinnest part. Since most modern instruments have a binding, you can't see this. Also, I would never put an inlay on an instrument soundboard for several reasons, but the most important is; it will affect the way the instrument sounds, and it won't be an improvement. Putting it on the back will have no negative affect, but nobody will see it there. So where do people tend to put inlays? On the fingerboard! Of course if you're going to do that you want the artwork to be as flat as possible. Also, you can't have frets in the way. You probably should have asked me to do it for you when I built your uke, but you can always remove your fingerboard, buy a blank, put in the inlay, put in the frets, shape it and glue it on the instrument...

So we put nemo on the fingerboard blank, and trace around it with a mechanicle pencil with a very thin lead. Then we use the xacto knife to scribe the outline. chalk it to make it visible.

Take deep breaths and say ommm for a while...and pick up the dremel.

You want to have several router bits of varying thickness. Bigger for rapid material removal and smaller for small details. Put in the smallest bit first and set the routing depth to just under the thickness of the artwork. Make a test pass on the edge of a piece of scrap and make sure the depth is just less than the thickness of the piece. The scrap in the best of all possible worlds will be the same material as the fingerboard - and here's why. Depending on the density of the wood, the sharpness of the blade, the speed of the router, etc. you might find you're fighting the router when you make that test cut. If you're fighting the router, you don't want to sink it into that fingerboard blank because you will destroy it. If that's the case, decrease the depth until the router goes exactly where you want it; you'll just have to make multiple passes.

Ready? Clamp the receiving piece to your worktable. Put on the safety glasses and the dust mask. Get as close to the work as you can and place the router in the center of the outline. Start her up and sink the blade into the wood. Steer it toward the side making sure it moves easily and smoothly and you can see what you're doing. Go up to the line and follow it around. You may want to turn the receiving piece as you go for the sake of visibility. If the bit is too big for an area; don't go in there, you'll go back there with a chisel later. Increase the depth checking it on your test piece, and go around again. Keep this up until you've got the whole thing. Increase the size of the bit, and start clearing the material inside of the cut you've made. Keep this process up until you've done the whole thing. Now get get you're smallest chisel or xacto knife and clean up the tiny details. Try the artwork in the hole, and do what you must to make it fit. This may mean fixing the hole, or it may mean fixing the artwork - do what will look best.

The rest is cake: glue it with sawdust, waxed paper, a caul, and clamp. When it's set hard, sand it down to the level of the fingerboard with 80 grit, then use all of the grades of sandpaper until it's all smooth as glass. You will not be putting a finish on this, since it's on a fingerboard. Use Minwax finishing wax on the whole fingerboard. When that's polished to nice gloss, use the edge of a razor blade to scrape it off in the direction of the grain. Dust it off and move on to the fret process...

Now I've talked about this as though the artwork is wood, but it works just as well with other materials such as abalone shell, mother of pearl, silver wire, even glass. As I've mentioned though, I avoid it. It adds nothing to the instrument acoustically and you run the risk of ruining something that works fine and probably looks good all by itself. I'm kind of old school that way; I think the wood is pretty enough as it is, and most of the fancy inlay work I've seen is just plain gaudy, though there are a handful of people out there turning guitars and banjos into museum pieces.

[Doug]

Very informative post. Glad to have you here on the forum.
Do you ever use hot sand to shade the veneer? It's a great way of adding a three dimensional effect between, say, petals of a flower or anything else where you want one piece to look higher than another. You have to be aware, though, that the shading process dries the veneer and shrinks it a bit. I heat fine masonry sand in a pan on the stove, mound it up a bit, stick a test piece of veneer in to make sure the temp is right - don't want to vaporize the piece, then use tweezers to stick the veneer into the sand along the edge that you want shaded.

[si16]

Great posts Ron, thanks for taking the time to go into such detail.