Kevin told me the body was finished and wanted to ship it to me to inlay the back. I’ve been working on finishing the inlays in between paying jobs, so it’s been somewhat sporadic, but managed to have a whole week without anything to work on but this.

I’d been dreading the borderwork around the large three letter combo “LIB”, as it’s three layers of very thin white/black/white, and no matter what materials I use to make it with it presents some problems. The first thing I did was to order an 8″ jeweler’s saw frame, which is still not deep enough to swing around the outside of these pieces, but certainly more wieldy than the 4″ one I usually use. Then I made a new benchpin out of Plexiglas. This one has no vacuum hood on top and is held to the bench by countersunk screws, so I can maneuver large sheets of material without bumping into any obstructions. The vacuum hose still picks up the dust, but not as efficiently as the standard pin.

After all the border layers were done I glued them down onto wax paper that was taped over the drawing, ensuring their conformity to the pattern. Then I glued down all the other interior sections that had been previously cut, and proceeded to fill the empty areas in between with 18k gold dust that had been saved from many earlier inlay jobs. Once the dust was filled to the level of the inlay plates I wicked in some very thin superglue to bond the whole mess together.

When everything was dry I lifted the plates off the wax paper to see what I had wrought. On the borderwork plates I waited to trim the last outline until they were all glued together. It was much easier to handle that way, but on the large lettering plate I didn’t have that luxury and had to deal with everything flopping all over the place while cutting it.

The undersides of these parts look like everything will be OK, but the hard part is yet to come. Inlaying it all into the light colored holly will be difficult, but not as trying as leveling it without grinding all that black epoxy matrix dust into the pores of the back, which will leave the surface looking dirty, not the virginal appearance I’m hoping to have.

Anyway, the next step is to see what’s left to cut before the body gets here this week. Once again I laid up all the finished parts on the drawing, but this time they’re not glued. This is just a quick way to note the undone pieces, most of which are the little scrolly things above and below the two secondary lettering lines. There are also some animal heads and one or two miscellaneous pieces, but the majority of the cutting is over, thankfully.

The knotwork to the left of the letters “ER” will be done after the majority of the inlay is in and level, probably by routing thin lines and gluing in .004″ silver bezel. Then there are over 1800 small holes to drill and fill with copper wire, and sections to dye and gold leaf, as you can see from this plate of the original manuscript.

At that time, I’ll get it back to Kevin for spraying and final assembly, and he can worry about it for awhile.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 11:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.