Michael Smith
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- Aug 20, 2010
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Fellow builder Link Van Cleave came over to my shop yesterday and we got discussing inlay techniques.
The first one I had never tried was to take the inlay material and place it on top of the material in which it would be inlayed and cut thru both at a 10 to 15 deg angle in such a way that the bottom piece ends up being slightly smaller due to the angle. Simple as it is I never thought of that. May not work for small pieces but that is how they get those perfect fits in marquetry.
The second technique new to me is shading the edge of wood to add realism. For instance if you were inlaying a coconut tree and you wanted the trunk to appear round you would shade one edge of the wood. He would do this by using a hot plate and heating a pot of dry sand then dipping the edge he wanted to darken repeatedly in the sand until the desired degree of shading was reached.
The first one I had never tried was to take the inlay material and place it on top of the material in which it would be inlayed and cut thru both at a 10 to 15 deg angle in such a way that the bottom piece ends up being slightly smaller due to the angle. Simple as it is I never thought of that. May not work for small pieces but that is how they get those perfect fits in marquetry.
The second technique new to me is shading the edge of wood to add realism. For instance if you were inlaying a coconut tree and you wanted the trunk to appear round you would shade one edge of the wood. He would do this by using a hot plate and heating a pot of dry sand then dipping the edge he wanted to darken repeatedly in the sand until the desired degree of shading was reached.