Tools
Well, I still don’t have the time to get back to cutting anything, but can at least give you an idea of what tools I’m using to accomplish this set of inlays.
I have to have some sort of magnification other than my eyeglasses, and up to this project I’ve been using a jeweler’s Optivisor with a #4 lens, which is 2x normal (there’s a shot of me wearing one in the last attachment). At the opening of the Museum of Making Music’s inlay show in June of this year (’07 for those of you who still aren’t sure) I met Ira Cooper from qedisit.com. His company makes beautiful magnification headgear with lights attached, either LED or halogen. Ira asked me to critique one of his products, and the only things I changed were having two lights instead of one, and having them be able to adjust on x and y axes instead of just up or down. The lenses are easily interchangeable with lower or higher magnification, and they’re easy to see around without having to flip up the headgear, unlike the Optivisor. Here’s one in action with a #5 lens, which is 2.25x I believe. Makes all the difference in the world. Thanks Ira.
I have several jeweler’s saw frames that I use constantly. All of them have the screw clamp on top and bottom that squeeze the blades between two metal plates. I’ve never used the ones that you have to feed the blade into a tiny hole and then clamp it, but it sounds like more work than I want to do. My two four inch frames are presently holding #3/0 and 6/0 blades respectively, because I switch back and forth a lot. The 6″ frame holds #2 blades for gross cutting large shapes quickly. If I have a bunch of pieces of drawing glued to a large plate of ebony or silver I’ll hog out the general outline of the area with that saw first.
Lest you think I’m undercutting my book and DVD sales, this page gives some information not covered in either media, but there’s not enough room here to go into the detail I poured into those other efforts.
Anyway, the saw in the center has the blade length adjusting screw ground off, and I slotted what was left for a screwdriver to tighten it. It kept getting snagged on my shirt while cutting in close quarters, and that extra half inch helps considerably.
The plates of inlay material are being cut on a bench pin I made from 1″ Plexiglas with a 1/8″ aluminum lamination epoxied on top. It’s stiff enough to take a lot of punishment, but I’m not wrecking all my blades when I run into the edges. Notice it has the ability to gather dust from above and below the pin via the vacuum attachment. Most pins have just a V slot heading directly away from the front edge. I also have one perpendicular to the long one, which is where I do 95% of my cutting. It gets chewed up by the saw, and I have to replace it about every 8 months.
Aside from my headlamp array I have a dentist’s articulated spotlight hanging from the ceiling over the bench and a gooseneck lamp with a full spectrum flourescent bulb on the other side. The more light the better…
What you see on the bench in this shot is a neck having its inlay clamped in the cavity while the glue is drying. The bent dowels hit the ceiling on the top end and apply pressure to the shell pieces. This is known as a go deck, among other names, and is used by many luthiers to glue braces to guitar tops and other fun stuff.
My router is a flexshaft model made by Otto Frei, similar to the Foredom, with good low end torque. I had to make my own bases for it, as they’re not made for any of the handpieces. The flat base is the one I use the most, and it has a hole through the base from the rear where I attach a hose from an airbrush compressor to blow away chips as I rout. While routing the cavity I hold the dust collector hose in front to catch the detritus the hose is blowing toward me. I have another base with a very small flat area around the bit which is useful for routing convex and concave curves, like on an archtop guitar.
I still have a slew of old dental bits for the router, but most of the work now is being done with carbide end mills ranging from.125″D down to .005″D.
Usually I rout the perimeter of the glued down drawing with a .020″ bit and graduate to larger ones for the interior.
Cyanoacrylates, or superglues, as they’re commonly known, are the adhesive of choice for inlays. I use the medium thin ones, where the viscosity is around 40 cps, so they’ll wick under inlay plates for a better bond. In the early 20th century inlays were installed with hide glue, which works well until moisture gets into it. Lots of pieces of shell have fallen out of those old harp guitars and other highly decorated instruments of that era. One of my superglued inlays was once in a house fire and was rescued after the firemen left. One side of the wooden plate was charred from the flames, and the whole thing was covered with a thick layer of soot. When we wiped off the grime, two feathers of the inlaid bird were pushed out from the surface a little’ bit, from the glue expansion in the intense heat, but the rest of the inlay was as flat as the day I leveled it. I’m not too worried about the inlays lasting over long periods of time.
The rest of my inlay tools are fairly commonplace: some sanding blocks, tweezers, a couple of X-Acto knives with #11 blades and a few medium grit needle files round out what I use on a daily basis. The only other not-so-common tool is a set of sheet metal Visegrips that have had the 3″ jaws sawn down to 1″. I use those for gripping tiny pieces of shell when they need to be filed.
That’s all for now.