Ok, actually it was an inlay. After getting my peghead profiled fairly accurately, I thought "hmmm - I'd better do the peghead inlay while it is still possible to hold the neck solidly - which is to say, before I profile, taper, or otherwise impair the squareness of the neck blank. So I got out the dremel (lower case "d" - it's actually an imitation) and stuck it in the router base (capital "D" Dremel) and practiced a bit. I spent a couple of days getting the line art done. My technique for this is to find a picture on the internet, print it out large (fit-to-page), and then trace it. I've got a light box for this purpose. Then I go over the pencil lines with a fine point Sharpie. I scan the tracing back into the computer. In this case, I had to combine two pictures - a brass spittoon and a drawing of a sunflower - the spittoon used as a vase. I did that in good old Paint - the only graphics program I seem to have on my computer at the moment. Then I insert the file into Word as a picture. I use Word because it allows you to size the picture in inches instead of pixels. Once I printed it out in a few sizes to see what would fit best on the peghead, I made two copies and printed them on label paper. I stuck one on the peghead to use as a guide to cut the cavity with the router. The other I stuck on a bone inlay blank and used a jeweler's saw and a set of needle files to cut it to exact profile. At that point I had to fiddle around with cavity, shaving off a bit here and a bit there so the inlay would fit. I also had to deepen it a little. Then I mixed up some 30-minute epoxy and mixed in sanding dust from the same ebony as the peghead (Macassar - very handsome stripes) and glued in the inlay blank. I held it in with a couple of clamps over a piece of double-stick tape backing paper. This was all Saturday. This morning early I removed the clamps found no bubbles in the glue, the inlay nearly flush, and good to go to the next steps - leveling, ingraving, and filling.
1 comment
on “A nice lay in”
banjotef Says:
Monday, October 27, 2008 @12:41:05 PM
yeah, that inlay stuff is fun! I want to try a vine inlay next.
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