Intarsia Carving.

[Wood Butcher]

Has anyone tried to create intarsia designs with their CW machine?
Other than the limitations of the bit diameter for doing tight pointed inside corners on a single piece the CW would pretty much take care of all of the work except the final sanding and attachment to the backer. Even the backer could be carved out. The individual pieces can be rotated on the grain background to visualize the most appealing orientation.

[HandTurnedMaple]

I have an intarsia eagle pattern I've been thinking about. There are 2 options as I see it. 1) Either you cut each piece out individually; or 2) you porgram it in several layers, outline each thickness and detail.

[BenCraig]

If anyone has completed an intarsia on the CW, I would love to see the results, and possible how they set it up in designer.

BC

[BobHill]

I would think that the biggest problem with Intarsia would be accounting for the bit width cutting out the shaped parts and then having them fit. With a band saw or scroll saw that's not much of a problem but they aren't 1/16" wide, much less 1/8" as you'd need to use in most cases.

Bob

[HandTurnedMaple]

I would say the best way to account for bit width when cutting the individual pieces is to cut the piece large and sand it down. But that is part of intarsia anyway.

[Marzluf]

I tried to do an inlay the other day. I knew that I would have issues with the bit diameter on this particular design (compass star), but gave it a try just to "let's see what happens".

I first drew the design in Sketchup. Then, imported into designer as a .Jpeg and made two coppies. One, I used the standard carve region on, and the other I used the cutout tool. Both were given opposite sides of the line to cut on. Not sure how that actually translates to bit position though, as you can see from the pics that the inlay piece is clearly 1/16" or so smaller all over. Obviously, it would be possible to round the pointed areas of the origianl design and inlarge the inlay to make up for the gap, but I haven't done any further testing.

For reference, the compass star is about 2-1/2" tall.


http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL96/791874/9102838/223785555.jpg

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL96/791874/9102838/223785575.jpg

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL96/791874/9102838/223785802.jpg

[HandTurnedMaple]

That's unfortunate. One of my first projects will be a butterfly inlay table. I guess the answer remains to cut the inlayed piece large and sand down. This definately strengthens my thoughts about testing it in pine first. But I made the pattern in Designer, so maybe that will make a difference.

[Greybeard]

Have you considered producing the two matching patterns, one slightly bigger than the other in an external painting program ?
I use corelphotopaint, but I'm sure they all have a similar tool, namely one that will allow you to enlarge a selected area by a given amount.
Say you draw your star(Star1) at 2.5" overall - black on a white background.
By using the appropriate "select" tool you can select just the star.
In corel this is called a mask.
You then need to identify the menu that enables you to "grow" the mask by a given number of pixels, say 10 pixels.
Then fill the new mask with black, and save the new image as Star2.
You'll need to experiment to get the right number of pixels to match the diameter of the bit you are going to use, but it will then be fixed for future use.

Regards
John

[Sawer]

This maybe close enough to 1/8". If you are using points the close as you can get is 9.4 points this will be .0005 over 1/8".
If you use a good vector program you should be able to select your outline width.
I'm new to this forum and CW but I've been scroll sawing for 20+ yrs and have used Corel Draw for about 12 yrs. Corel is the best program for our kind of work, my opinion. I've tried many of the others and they don't hold a candle to Draw.

[autobody]

I've done some intrasia, just a thought. What if one created all the pieces as you usually do, shape and fit them but don't glue to a backer.

Take the individual parts that are all from the same type of wood and hot glue them to your scanning sled then scan them. Repeat for all the different woods.

I may try this at some point and post the results, if anyone else does this please post.

Thanks ~Mike