Clear Stream Fine Woodworking (CSFW)

Main Inlay: Click for here for a larger version.

This was the part of the boat I was THE most nervous about: cutting and gluing in the inlays on the deck. The “Nereida” has the most complex and largest inlays I have ever attempted. The artwork on Christine’s boat was mostly printed overlays so those don’t count! A stated in previous posts the primary inlay on the deck is of one of the Nereides (sea nymph) riding a hippokampus (a mythological sea horse). The base picture is a tracing from an ancient Greek urn. The inlay is mostly wood veneers (maple, walnut, cherry and others) with Mother-of-Pearl and green abalone accents. I did modify it slightly: The bird on the original got moved forward on the deck and will sit in the middle of the fore hatch. Only 28 hours to cut, fit and attach both the seabird and the hippokampus inlays. Only… On the aft hatch will be the CSFW logo, all in wood veneers (that’ll be in Part II).

Click on the “more” tag to see how I did it…
I did this inlay in a fashion many guitar makers would recognize. It’s no accident. For my birthday last year Christine gave me a great book on inlaying written by one of the masters of the trade, Larry Robertson. I followed his guidelines pretty closely. Some day I hope to be a fraction as good as he is…

For any inlay you start with a good picture. The best image I could get was this one. Pretty small. I enlarged in on my MacBook from 309 x 206 to about 2100 x 1300 pixels. Full size it would fit on sheet of Legal paper. would be it would be on the boat. Naturally when you enlarge something that much you’re going to get a fuzzy image. Using some scripts I was able to enhance it a little bit but nowhere near enough to cut the pieces directly. I also had to simplify it and figure out what areas would be veneer, pearl, etc. So I made a tracing using wax paper, a hard pencil to keep the lines thin, and then photocopied it about 10 times. I’ll be using all of them. I took one and made it the master I would reference. I colored it up quickly using colored pencils and figured out what woods/shells would go where. Invaluable…

For the shell I went online to a Stewart-MacDonald, a store catering to luthiers (builders of stringed instruments like guitars, banjos, etc.). I bought one ounce packages of both Mother-of-Pearl and Green Abalone, pre-cut dots of abalone and some specialized inlay tools (jewelers saw and small carbide router bits). For the veneer I went to Grizzly. They had a sample pack with a bunch of different veneers. Some of the veneers are pretty standard and I quickly recognized them (maple, cherry, walnut, mahogany, pine, lacewood, etc). The remainder: I have no clue WHAT they are! Veneer is pretty thin (about 0.020″ or a 0.5 mm) while the shell slabs are all a pretty standard thickness of 0.050″ or 1.3mm. My design had both next to each other. Eventually they would need to be leveled to each other. To make my life easier later on I made the veneer thicker. Using some epoxy I laminated a few sheets of the veneer to some paper-backed flexible veneer I had used on other boats. It brought the veneer very close to the thickness of the shell. Sweet. Time to start cutting.

I made a cutting board with a V in it out of a scrap piece of maple and screwed it to my bench. I got out my new jeweler’s saw with fine and extra-fine blades and started to cut. I cut out and glued pieces of the pattern onto the veneer and shell slabs, rough cut them on the scroll saw to make them easier to hold while cutting and cut out each piece. For the shell I ended up using a coarser blade. MOP and abalone shell are hard and brittle materials. Rubbing a little paraffin wax on the blade is supposed to help. During the tracing stage, you want a line the thickness of the blade. When you cut the pieces you (in theory) cut directly on the lines. You end up with pieced that (should) fit together perfectly with a hair-line gap between them for the glue. That’s the theory at least. I think I did ok…

I took one copy of the inlay and cut out each portion roughly. Using spray-glue I attached them directly to the deck. I then covered them with wax paper. The individual cut pieces are now glued together and to the wax paper at their final position in the inlay using thick cyanoacrylate glue (eg. super glue). When all the cut pieces of the entire inlay were glued together I set about setting the pre-cut, round dots of green abalone. These are used mostly as fret markers on guitar necks. I simply drilled them out using brad-point drill bits chucked in my portable drill and then glued them in. Done.

Next, I pulled off the entire inlay glued together on the wax paper. I flipped it over and gently peeled off all the wax paper. I set it aside nearby on the deck and went to routing out the cavity that the inlay will sit in. I put a 1/32″ (0.03125″ or 0.79 mm) solid carbide, downcut, router bit in my Dremel tool, which is set up in a nice metal base I also bought from the luthiery, and traced the outline of the inlay. I routed out the remainder of the wood using progressively larger bits (1/16″ up to 1/4″ or 1.6 to 6.4 mm). Ideally the inlay should have slipped right in. The fit wasn’t perfect. I needed to pare away some of the edges to get it to sit in the recess. When it fit perfectly I mixed up some epoxy, coated both the inlay and the recess and pressed the inlay in. To hold it while the epoxy cured I covered the inlay with wax paper and a bunch of small pine blocks. I then wrapped the inlay with masking and packing tape. The tape puts pressure on the blocks which clamps the inlay tightly to the deck.

This morning, after the epoxy had cured overnight, but still a little soft, I pulled off the tape, blocks and wax paper. I scraped off any epoxy that had seeped out of the joints. It’s better to scrape it off now while it’s soft. I’ll come back this afternoon after it’s cured some more and sand everything flush. It’ll be sealed with a coat of epoxy….