Inlay Technique for STARS

[PSQRD]

I appreciate the help Dev. For making a flag and just having stars carved in this would be amazing and I may use it for that. What I was currently looking for was a method for doing an inlay of the stars in contrasting wood to use for a cutting board for example. I appreciate the help.
Paul

[PSQRD]

Well the technique works to a certain extent. I think the limit is 3/4 inch before it fails (at least with the 1/16 bit). Test carved on some scrap pieces I had lying around. Turned out to be cherry and poplar. I would never actually use those together in a real project but they were on top of my scrap bin so used them.

I still think the smallest I would go is 1 inch with this technique but it is definitely doable with 3/4 in stars. I guess it all depends on the project.

They do look good though.

- O

Well I'll be! The raster approach was a different way of going about the v bit inlay and I was iffy but they turned out pretty nicely! Once I get my leg healed up from surgery and some PM on my machine I will play around with your method and am going to attempt the v bit method if I can get my head wrapped around it. I've seen MTM WOOD do some pretty small thin inlays that I was surprised would even work. I realize there are some drawbacks from our CNC vs his $50,000 machine but it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot and if it works out maybe establish a method. I really appreciate it Oscar!
-Paul

[oscarl48]

Paul,

I made the mistake of showing my wife the inlaid stars. She is demanding an American Flag for a wall decoration. I think I'll be using black walnut for the star field, maple for the stars and mahogany and maple or cherry for the stripes. lol. Thanks!

- Oscar

P.S. Finished making the patterns for the flag. Final dimensions on the flag are 16.25 x 24.375 inches. Star field is 12 x 8.75 inches. This allows me stripes to be 1.25 inches wide.

Carve time around 2 hours for the inlay and stars as two separate carves. (~51 minutes inlay and 1:10 for stars).

Not as horrible as I thought it would be. Did a quick depth profile star comparison (which I assume is similar to dxf carve time) and you save about 40 minutes vs raster. You will still have to raster the stars I think so no time savings there. I'll post pictures when complete in some future time.

[PSQRD]

Maaan I can relate! haha, my wife gets a hint of something that's cool and it gets added to the honey do list regardless of how simple or complex. I'm really excited in multiple ways, one because of the progress of this idea but also because it's driving someone else (you ) to take the idea and run with it. Keep me posted with updates, if I can find the video link for the really small inlay I'll post it here for you to check out - more food for thought on the idea, still really interested in the flag you're making, good luck!
Paul

[oscarl48]

First attempt ended in failure. I attempted to replicate the video I saw where the stars were carved as a positive and negative and then glued together.

To attempt to keep them exactly the same by inverting the positive to get the negative pattern. The carves just did not line up. The first row kind of fit but the end of the board they were completely misaligned. Tomorrow I'll slice the stars separately and see how they fit.

- O

[PSQRD]

Interesting - I found an ebook type write up written by someone on v bit inlays for conventional CNC's. I am still curious and will stay tuned on your progress, once I get back on my feet, as I mentioned before I will give the v bit method a go. I'll rate my attempt a pass or fail based off of being able to do multiple stars in one shot like you are now. Fingers crossed*, I hope chopping up the stars works for you brother, walnut doesn't make good firewood .

[oscarl48]

Paul, the v-inlay should work. May take a little experimenting to get the v bit inlay to match the star inserts. The way I did it also works but I did something wrong. I had to have inadvertently changed the dimension of the pattern as I was tweaking the pattern. It was way off.

You are right on the cost of the hardwood. Picked up 3 bft of black walnut and 4 bft of cherry and left the store 80 dollars poorer. The prices have gone up a lot locally for hardwoods.

I have 15 stars glued in and 35 more to go. I did break a star while I was cutting them up so will have to carve a few more. It looks like it will work but really slow going since I have to glue each star individually. Should have it done by next weekend. Plan to do a few stars every night after work.

- O

[PSQRD]

Regardless, 1) you're still managing to salvage that walnut and 2) when it's finished the contrast is going to look awesome - keep us updated!

[oscarl48]

Failure. I got impatient and tried to do several at one time where I thought they aligned okay. They didn't. - scrap wood

Tried a second time. Even though the inlay and proud sections were inverse of each other and I made sure the wood blanks were exactly the same they were still way off in alignment. I also had a lot of errors where it kept saying reinsert the card which meant I had to restart the machine. That probably added a lot of error to the carve. Overall I just don't think "my" machine has the precision to accomplish this technique consistently. Even a 1/32 deviation can start impacting the overlap. -scrap wood

Having said that the CW can accomplish the project easily with gluing each star individually negating the precision over a large area issue. These were expensive failures with the black walnut and maple blanks.

I'll start the third attempt with gluing in individual stars today. Time consuming but the results are excellent.

[oscarl48]

Third attempt.

Finished the inlays today. Really time consuming with cutting out each star and gluing each one individually but it came out great. Need to cut out the stripes and glue them together tonight. Should have pictures of the finished project tomorrow. I'll post in my weekend projects thread.

For individual inlays this technique definitely works (at least on raster since I don't have the dxf addon)

Happy carving

- Oscar