Marc:The Wood Whisperer
is brought to you by Powermatic. The gold standard since 1921, and by Rockler Woodworking and Hardware. Create with confidence. How do you take a simple project from drab to fab? Inlay baby, inlay. (lively music) Now just about any project can be kicked up a few notches by adding some sort of a decorative inlay. This shaker table is beautiful. Very elegantly designed. It's a classic, classic
design that looks great but it's a simple cherry table and I think it could really use a little bit of an adornment on the top. A freehand router inlay
is a great way to do that.
I'm thinking about putting
a very simple leaf design toward one of the corners just to kick it up a notch. That's pretty much what
we're gonna focus on today is the process of doing that. First, I'd like to take a
little trip down memory lane and show you one of my very early projects that I made for Nicole that I did my first inlay on. Let's check it out. All right, so here it is. Never before seen. I don't think I've shown any
pictures of this to anybody, I've never posted any
information about this project because it was pretty early
in my woodworking career that I made this for Nicole.
Very simple jewelry box. Two doors on the front that open to reveal a set of drawers on the inside. The drawers, this was
actually Nicole's idea to come up with a design that's repeated only twice even though
there's four drawers. The two drawers together
make the circular design but each drawer has a half circle on it. Let's see. Dovetailed on the sides. Simple wooden runners. Really nothing too tricky
as far as this stuff goes. Knife hinges. First time I ever installed those, and it came out pretty nice. The inspiration other than Nicole, the inspiration for this project was the inlay on the front. I had taken a class with David Marks, in fact, it was the first time that I had met David beyond
meeting him at a show. I took a class with him on inlay which by the way he still
does teach that class in his shop in Santa Rosa. I'll put a link in the show
notes if you're interested and you're in the
Northern California area. I highly recommend you take it. He does a marquetry and router-based inlay
class that's fantastic.
That was the class that I took with him. As part of the class, I basically built this
little leaf here in the front and you can see on the other door here is where I practiced the first time. I came home with this
little practice board with this really nicely
figured maple on the front and my practice inlay, and I figured, you know what I want to do something with this. I don't know what to do but I want to do something. I figured let me cut that piece, my practice board in half. I can make two doors and then the idea just came to me. Maybe I should build a
jewelry box out of this, and since this inlay was so representative of my path as a woodworker just starting I thought it would be great
to build something for Nicole that kind of captures the essence of that time in my life.
Here's the project. In true woodworker fashion before I go into detail on this inlay I want to show you all the flaws because that's always fun. First of all in the back here you could see the biscuit
that I cut through. Apparently you see that's what happens when you don't pay attention to where you place your biscuits on a glue up like this. The biscuit is showing here. Now because this was
originally intended to be a prototype for a design which I did make a second version of this that came out quite a bit nicer but just doesn't have the story to it, look at what I did with the top here.
That's one of the major flaws. The other thing is of course these doors are now not closing all the way. I think maybe a little bit of expansion, maybe my hinges weren't installed properly but that actually, I can probably fix that if I really wanted to. Of course, I was very new to dovetails and a dovetail jig so there's a few gaps here, but when you have such a dark wood combined with such a lighter color wood those gaps are much less noticeable. That's a nice little trick if you're early in your woodworking career and you want things to look
nicer than they really do. Combine dark and light woods. It works miracles. The inlay itself consists of about seven pieces of material. There's two pieces for each leaf and the stem is constructed
of three separate pieces.
I believe the stem was wenge and if I'm not mistaken
this was olive wood. I can't 100% remember
that but I'm pretty sure. Really the process of creating this inlay is a matter of understanding which pieces get put in first, because each one of these pieces is placed in separately. You have to determine what the order of that placement is in order to get the design to look the way you want it to look. We're gonna do something
very similar to this today. Just a very nice, simple inlay that we … You don't want to over
complicate it at first. You want to keep it
simple to ensure success and you could always build
upon it as time goes on and your next inlay can
be that much more complex.
Let's dig right into it. To create decorative inlay, to put it in the simplest
term as possible, all you really need to do is cut a particular shape out in some sort of a figured wood or whatever wood you want
it to be made out of. You could see I've got
quite a collection here of different things. I cut this to about 1/8 of an inch thick. Maybe a little bit less. You cut your image out in this material and then you route the
substrate, your tabletop or whatever it is that you
want to put that inlay into.
You route the recess and
you pop that piece in. We'll get into the entire process but really it starts with a drawing. You could have … I've got a bunch of different
books with artwork in it, with natural pictures of leaves and trees and things like that, and I use those to get my basic images. I'm not that great of an artist. I can't draw things to save my life. I like to really copy images that I see. I've even gone to the extent of finding a picture on the web, taking a piece of tracing paper and putting it up on my monitor to get a basic shape of a flower. In fact, that's what I did
with my inlaid hall table. I had this really interesting
picture of a flower here that I wasn't really sure
how to draw freehand. I just took it right off of the screen. That's the idea. You need to start with a picture but keep in mind, it has
to be relatively simple.
Because with this type of inlaying you don't really have the
ability to get too detailed. We're limited by the
size of our router bits and the smallest router bit I
have is about 1/16 of an inch so you can't get all that much detail and you don't have nearly as much control as you do with something
like let's say marquetry.
What you have to do is let
the wood speak for itself. Let the wood's grain be what really jazzes this thing up and takes it to the next level. Picking the type of material
to use in your project is absolutely crucial to your success. Once you have your master picture and whether that is the book itself. A book that a has a
photograph in it or something, or you've draw something on a
piece of paper for yourself, you want to create what you're gonna call your master tracing.
Get a piece of tracing paper and take your original design and then make sure you get a nice, accurate tracing of that picture. This is what we're
going to use to transfer these designs to our workpiece. I could see what I've got here is a very simple leaf design and that's the one that we're gonna use for this project. This is a leaf and stem
design that I used on, well in fact, I used it on the second version of that jewelry box that I made which was actually for a customer. Things are a little bit more refined, a little bit cleaner.
You'll notice the design
really is very simple. It consists of a stem and two leaves. Each leaf is consisting
of basically two pieces and what we need to do right now is determine how these pieces overlap because whatever is in the background has to be inlaid first, and then everything else
gets inlaid on top of it. You could see this leaf
here is in the background but this leaf is in the foreground. This one has to go in first and then we'll put this one on top of it. The stem can go, it's up to you. The stem can go first, it can go last. Depending on how you want the stem to work into these pieces
of the leaf material, but that's kind of flexible
as far as I'm concerned. Now we know this piece
needs to go in first.
What I like to do is
label each piece of wood with a number that tells me which one is gonna go first. I'm gonna start on the outside here, that's piece number one,
it's piece number two, piece number three, and piece number four. We'll start by doing this
little moon shape piece here. We'll drop this guy right on top of it then we'll come in with this piece third, this piece fourth, and again, the stem can
either actually be number one or number five in this case.
I think what I'd like to see is the inlay somewhere in the bottom right corner, toward the front of the table. Right there it looks pretty good. What I want to do is
create reference marks because you're gonna have
to transfer the design to the table a couple different times. It's nice to have reference marks outside of the drawing that will help you place this in the proper location later. I'm gonna start by taping the corner here with some blue tape. It doesn't really need to
be anything more than that. I just want to make sure that the piece goes back in the same position after I put the carbon paper on in here. Carbon paper believe it or not, yes, they still make it. You might get some funny looks when you go into a store
and ask for it though.
Put some carbon paper under your tracing and we're gonna use that
to transfer the image. Nothing tricky here. Just start going around. Now here's the reason for
those reference marks. I'm gonna transfer those to the workpiece as well. Because I can't work with
this piece of paper here. I'm gonna have to take this paper off. The next time I need to put the paper back to trace my drawing on again, I now have this marks here that show me exactly where this piece goes and then I could tape it back down and put the image back in place. Now we're gonna take our tracing and we're going to use our inlay material and draw these individual shapes onto the inlay material. Before we do that it's important to understand
this concept of overlapping. Wherever the pieces overlap we have to sort of be careful with how we put them together. You see the seam right here in the middle, if I just cut this piece
perfectly to this shape and then this piece
perfectly to this shape, we are making a lot of
extra work for ourselves and hoping that this seam
is gonna be nice and tight between these two pieces.
We have an advantage that we're putting these things in one piece at a time. What I'm gonna do is this
first piece that goes in where the side that it meets another piece is actually gonna get cut just a little bit over sized, so that I could put that piece in, flush everything down and then come with the next piece and put it over top. That second piece will then overlap some of that material that
we put in that first piece and give us a nice tight seam between these two pieces.
Again, it will make a lot more sense as we move forward. If that's a little bit confusing right now don't worry about it but just understand that
I'll be cutting my pieces slightly over sized on this side where they meet another piece. Before I assign pieces of wood to each of these individual leaf parts, I want to draw in some lines that will sort of give me an idea of what the grain direction should be because this is a leaf, right? If this were a natural leaf, the grain direction would go at sort of a 45-degree angle to the center part of the leaf here.
The vein or where the two halves meet. It's important to get these on there because they're gonna
serve as reference points. One of the great things
about using tracing paper is the fact that you could see through it. You can see I've already
cut some leaf parts out of this piece. You can move it around
until that grain matches up just where you want it to. Here's a piece of zebrawood. That's a great leaf material. This is a piece of I
believe this is canarywood. That's another great
piece for these nice veins that will be great for a leaf. If you want to do something more subtle, of course you've got things like walnut. You want to be a little bit more loud.
You've got stuff like Padauk here, some mahogany to be a
little bit more reserved. I think I'm gonna go with
probably the zebrawood. I don't know. It's a tough choice. This cherry is gonna get darker over time and I think the zebrawood
is gonna standout a little bit more. The cherry will probably
get closer in color to this piece of canarywood and it will make this a
little bit less noticeable. I think I'll stick with
the zebrawood for this one. I'm only worried about
piece number one right now. I'm gonna take this to the wood and I'm just gonna move it around. You can see the grain in the zebra wood is vertical here. I'm gonna turn it until it matches up. That's not too bad.
You could see I've got this dark streak. If you think somewhere in this leaf there would naturally be something dark. Maybe here at the base. Maybe even here at the tip you would have a dark spot. Along this line in the center. You could use this piece to sort of paint that leaf on. Whatever way you think it should be done. For me I think I'm gonna let some of that darker color come into the
bottom of my leaf here. Just to keep things from moving around. A little piece of tape. Just insert the carbon paper. Trace leaf number one. Remember I mentioned the overlap. If I cut this piece
directly to the this line and then try to match my other piece up directly to that line. It's gonna be very difficult to do. I do want to overlap. Instead of cutting directly to my line, I'm over sizing this piece by just a little bit.
It doesn't really matter. I can freehand that because the second piece is gonna come in and overlap right on top of that. If this edge is a little wacky it's not that big of a deal. Without a doubt the best tool for getting these pieces cut out is a scroll saw. Unfortunately with my smaller shop setup, the scroll saw's in storage right now. I could go get it but I think I can accomplish these cuts using my bandsaw and a quarter inch blade. You just want to make sure that you don't get too close with your fingers and you have a nice controlled cut. The thing is if you get more
complex with your design and those pieces get skinnier and skinnier you're absolutely gonna have
to use a scroll saw to do it or if you want to do it by hand a fretsaw or coping saw
will get the job done too. For these pieces they're pretty big and there's not really
any intricate curves that we have to worry about. I should be able to do
it with the bandsaw.
(lively country music) If the surface is a little bit ratty don't even think twice about it. Just use a little bit of sandpaper and just kind of smooth
it out a little bit. Okay, it's not absolutely critical that this be a perfect curve because this is supposed
to be a leaf, right? If it's a little bit off that's okay. What you don't want is a bunch of cut ridges and mill marks from your saw. That's why it's important if you do use something
like the bandsaw like I did that you get rid of all
the little frayed edges and you smooth that
curve out a little bit.
One way to do that is with
a sandpaper like this. Just kind of roll it across. Now we need to attach our inlay piece to the substrate itself
in the right location. We're gonna use double
stick tape to do it. This stuff you guys hear
me talk about this a lot. This is sold as Turner's tape and I found it at Woodcraft and Rockler. Both under that name, Turner's Tape. It's very thin and incredibly sticky. It's great for something like this. I'm basically just
gonna take a small piece of Turner's Tape but one that's big enough to cover the full length of a piece and attach the double stick tape. A little finger pressure
is really all you need. Now I'm just gonna use an X-Acto knife to trace around the piece of inlay.
Because I really want to cut
away all that excess tape. This will give us a nice custom sized piece of double stick tape here. Now I just peel off the … I'll use my fingernail to make sure it's firmly attached to
the back of the inlay. We don't want that to come off. Peel off the paper backing. Now I can drop it in place. I'm going to align it with the outside of the leaf. Not to worried about the inside. That's pretty good. This isn't going anywhere and this is good because what we need to do is take a very, very sharp, brand new X-Acto knife and we're gong to trace around the outside of this piece.
I usually start by taking nice, light scoring cuts. Just lightly sever the grain. If you push too hard at first you could trail of in
some unusual direction that would really, really mess things up. Take your time and once
that groove is established you could start to press
down a little bit harder. I am trying to keep my blade
close to vertical here.
I may give it a slight angle but I'm trying to stay as
close to vertical as I can. Just take your time and trace around. Patience pays off here. These corners are probably
the trickiest part so I just take a series of
small little cuts like this as I work my way around the corner. Until they all connect. Once you're pretty confident that you've got a nice tracing all the way around the perimeter. You really only get one shot at this so make sure it's good. Take a nice thin putty knife and just very carefully, very patiently start to wiggle the knife underneath. You do not want to crack this and especially in these areas here where the grain is running this way and you've got these little tiny pieces.
It's incredibly easy to split that. You could see it doesn't take a whole lot to loosen it up. Just take your time again. Inlay is not a sport for the impatient. All these extra pencil lines and everything that are here can only serve to confuse you. What I recommend doing is taking a pencil. Tracing in to the groove that you've already cut with your knife. I'm gonna get some pencil
dust down in there. Then come back with your eraser and go across your line. Don't go with it, go across it. We're gonna drive pencil
shavings or pencil dust and the shavings from the
eraser down into that groove and that's gonna help darken it for us. You don't have to erase the entire image. You could see with the pencil gone we've got a nice accurate line showing us exactly where
this piece is gonna go.
Now we need to make a
recess in the surface following our tracing
line that we just made that this little piece can pop right into. First thing you need to know is that the depth of that hole is actually gonna be just
a little bit shallower than the thickness of this work piece. When this drops in we want
it to sit a little bit proud of the surface and then we can use a scraper or something to smooth it all out and make it level with
the rest of the surface.
The other thing we need to do is consider what tool we're going to use to make that recess. For me there is nothing better than just a standard router and a couple of straight router bits. There are other options out there. I've got one of these Foredom kits that's basically like
a high powered dremel. You could certainly use a dremel and you can also use a laminate trimmer. The feedback that I've gotten
from people who do this and also my experience
with these lighter tools is that the lighter that tool is the harder it is to keep that bit tracking the way you want it to. A really light base like this doesn't really resist
the motion of the grain. If the grain wants to pull that bit in a certain direction, it's very difficult to
stop it using that tool.
Some people have had great success with it so I can't knock it, but for me personally, the heft and the weight of
a standard full sized router is really the way to go because then I can just
grab hold of the base and move it around and it's not gonna go anywhere unless I want it to. I really have to deliberately push it in a particular direction
for it to go there. The secret here for using a tool like this is all in the router bits. I have two very, very small bits here. I've got one that's an 1/8 of an inch and the other is a 1/16. Now these bits are great for this because the 1/8 inch one can hog out the bulk of the material getting pretty close to the line. The 1/16 is what I'm gonna use to really just kiss that surface and very carefully get to my line.
You can have two routers set up or you could change the setup in between and switch from bit to bit, whatever you're comfortable with. The big router is the way that we're gonna go with this. We're going old school on this one. What I've got here is
a very bad illustration showing essentially the
groove that we've made with our X-Acto knife. What you would see if you
took a little cross section is that we have created
somewhat of a V groove notch all the way around the workpiece. Here's what you're looking for and I will be using magnifying lenses to watch this as I'm doing my routing.
The router bit comes along this way and as it approaches this V groove the bit starts to create
this little frayed edges at the top as the wood kind
of tears out a little bit. It's very, very small but they're there. You'll see these little fuzzies as you go. At this point, there's no more material here. The fuzzies just kind of pop off and once you see that happen you know you are in the zone where you need to stop. As soon as those frayed edges disappear you know you have maybe
one more pass at best to remove these little bit
of material of that V groove. We're looking for those
frayed edges to disappear. Once they're gone maybe
one more slight pass. If you're being daring you
might just stop right there and call it done. That is what I'm looking
for as I'm routing and unfortunately my camera and setup is probably not gonna be
able to show you that detail but this is a pretty good illustration of what you're looking for.
Here's how I set the router depth. First of all I plunge the bit. Plunge the whole router down until it contacts the bench like that. That's the zero point. Then I use the work piece itself with the plunge bar mechanism here. Put it between the plunge bar and the stop and lock it down. What that would do is give us a recess that's exactly the
thickness of our workpiece. Remember I said I want the workpiece to stand a little bit proud, which means I need to bring this bar up just a smidgeon, whatever
a smidgeon might be. A 32nd and 64th. What I'm gonna do is use
my built-in meter here. Now this is metric but
it really doesn't matter. I'm gonna bring it up maybe a millimeter, maybe a half a millimeter.
Now much at all. Then loosen the plunge bar and I let it drop down to the point that it catches. That's one more millimeter or half and notice that my workpiece
doesn't fit anymore. That's perfect. My router is all set and ready to go. My workpiece is clamped to the workbench. We want to make sure that
it doesn't move at all and you can use eye protection for this but to be completely honest with you, I don't usually do that because the eye protection in addition to my magnifying headset, distorts my vision too much.
I can't see exactly what I'm doing. This is one of those times that I take a little
bit of a calculated risk by not having complete
solid eye protection. What I've got is this. You do have to be careful. Be very cautious with it. I'm gonna have to recommend that you do use eye protection but you're gonna see me breaking my own recommendation because I'm not going to. Sometimes in woodworking when you're doing these things you can't always be as safe
as you want to on paper. Sometimes for the sake of
getting the better result you do have to make a sacrifice somewhere and take a calculated risk. Just be careful. Don't do anything stupid
and you should be okay. This is one of those
interesting times in woodworking that I arrive at sort of this zen moment.
This connection with the work that is kind of hard to describe. A lot of hand tool users have it and they think that it's a very relaxing, almost you're planing a board down and you get into this bit of a trance. For me it happens when I
close off outside stimulation and I'm only focused on this workpiece. It happens because the router is loud and what I wind up doing is throwing on some headphones.
I'll even use my noise
cancelling headphones and put on some great music, and I just get so in the
zone of what I'm doing that it's incredibly relaxing, and something like this doesn't have to be very tricky. It's got a lot of parts to the process but it can be a relaxing
and fun experience. That's what I recommend doing. Throw on some headphones, crank up some good tunes. In fact, you know what? Cue the music. Let's get started. (reggae music) Now I've gone about as far as I can go up on this corner here
with the router bit. What I'm gonna use is an X-Acto knife just to kind of slowly but surely chisel that corner away.
If you have a fine set of
chisels that will do this that's fine too. Sometimes these points are just a little bit too severe. Take your time. Slowly but surely work your way back. That's pretty good. Let's do a test fit. I'll be honest with you, no matter how good you are, you are likely to have
to do some rework here. It's almost impossible to get this perfect on the first shot or maybe even the second shot. You basically get it as close as you can.
Try to find the areas that
are the offending spots and if you see something that
looks a little tight there just go back and try and scrape, but what you want to do is scrape on a bit of an angle this way so you're cleaning out
material from the bottom and you're not really
touching this top borderline. If you do, if you touch
that top borderline you will actually create gaps and we don't want that. If it's really, really close and you just can't figure out exactly where the offending area is, the easiest thing I find to do is to taper and start to use a little bit of sanding.
Maybe a file or something and just kind of give yourself a little bit of a tapered
edge there toward the bottom, and essentially what you're gonna do now is create a wedge. Now at this point this piece is almost going in. I know that if I push it any more it's gonna wedge itself in there and I'm not gonna be able to get it out. That is close enough and the next thing to do
is to put glue in there and pound it down with a mallet and make sure it sits
perfectly all the way down.
You have an option at this point though. You could add a little bit more of visual interest in a decor development if you just sort of burn
the inside corners here using a technique called sand shading. I'll show you how that's done now. Sand shading is literally
using playground sand or any type of sand. Something nice and fine grained like this. I've had it in that old pot and I put it on a hotplate and you put the wood inside there and it actually chars the surface.
What we're trying to do is introduce a little bit of a color gradient where it gets darker toward the edge and it's a very effective
way to create a shadow line. When two pieces of the zebrawood butt up against each other, that joint if it's nice and tight is relatively uninteresting. The only thing that tells you that it is two pieces of wood is that the grain is changing direction. Imagine if where those two
pieces meet in the middle we can actually get a little color there that dissipates as it gets closer to the middle of this piece, and that's what sand shading here does. What you're gonna need like
I said is the hotplate, some sand and a little pot like this.
You want to warm it up pretty good. Just bury it down a little bit and you're probably gonna have to play with the heat settings on this because you don't want
it to burn too quickly and you never leave this unattended. You turn your back on this thing. It's gonna wind up burning on you. If you've given it a few
minutes and you come back you don't really see anything. You may want to turn the
heat up just a little bit. I'm pretty happy with that. Now I'm just gonna get a little bit of color on the other side. Not much. I'm just gonna touch this center point as low as I can just to give it a little hint of color at that far edge. That looks pretty good. Looks a little bit drastic but trust me it will clean up real nice.
Don't forget turn off your hotplate. One thing to keep in mind is the treatment that we just
gave this piece of wood was high dry heat. What's that gonna do? It's gonna drive any last bit of moisture that was in this piece right out and it's gonna cause it
to shrink a little bit. You may find that the piece that was tight fitting before now just drops in perfectly. What I like to do in this case. If it's a little bit too loose I want to bring some moisture
back to this workpiece because it's inaccurate. The ambient moisture
that was in that piece dictated a certain size before and by driving the moisture out, we actually made it smaller. I just like to spray it
with a little bit of water and let it sit for a couple minutes to help introduce some
moisture back into it. Just make sure it dries thoroughly before you put it back in. All right, now we just
add a little bit of glue into the recess.
Spread it around thoroughly. Make sure you get it
up on the edges there. We drop it in place very carefully because when it's charred like this it becomes more brittle so you have to be real careful with it. Pretty close. Some light taps with the dead blow and drop it down. (tapping) This may seem a little bit odd but what I'm gonna do is sand the workpiece a little bit.
Basically I'm gonna create a little sawdust slurry with some of the glue
that's squeezing out. You see how it's pulling up. The sand is mixing with the glue and it's creating a little bit of a paste toward the outside. If you have some gaps to contend with that's what you want. Let me just take my finger and take some of this sawdust glue paste that we've created.
It looks terrible and
messy now but trust me, it will look fine. I don't have much squeeze
out here to worry about. I'm just using a block
with some blue tape on it. You could use some packing tape. Basically you just want something that the glue really isn't gonna grip to and you want to make sure that the glue doesn't get to the wood, because that wouldn't
be good if it's stuck. While the first piece dries in the clamp, we could start cutting
out our second piece. Now we're tracing on number two. That's this guy right here. Remember number two is behind number three and you notice, number two
actually stops right here and the line for number three starts and then number two
resumes again right there. We're gonna pretend that
this leaf isn't here. We need to draw at least some semblance of what that leaf would have looked like if this piece wasn't in front of it. Even though the line stops here I'm going to continue across. It comes back out and meets the bottom. Now in a subsequent step, this little piece of material here is gonna get covered
by piece number three, but that's okay.
We're building layer upon layer to create that sense of depth. You could see piece
number two coming to life. Cut this out of the bandsaw again. it's been several hours now so we can see how we did. Looks pretty good. Let's scrape it so it's nice and clean. Level it with the surface. Now we'll get a real good
idea of how we've done. All right and as we start to clean it up you could see it reveals
a nice light center, a dark tip down here, a little dark area down there and a little color on the edges. Just adds a visual interest that you simply can't
get from the raw piece. Big difference there. Now to drop in piece number two we need to know exactly
where to locate it. I suppose we could just line it up and take our best guess but let's do it the proper way. We've got our index marks in a few different locations here. This will show you exactly why we needed those in the first place. Just line up the cross hairs. Okay. Now we know we're pretty much in the exact same position we were at the very first time.
Come back through with our carbon paper and let's draw on piece number two again. Now this piece will go
right on top like so. Hopefully you can see
here what we've done. You see this line right there. Now when we create this recess we're gonna have a nice crisp line that's going to join these two pieces. As the same deal as
before, double stick tape. And once again, we very carefully drop this in the proper location. (lively music) Another thing I wanted to
tell you before I jump into routing this second part of the leaf is this is one of the few times you will ever see me let go of the handles of the router.
Once this thing starts
spinning I lock the trigger on so that it doesn't turn off by itself and then I'll grab the
base with both hands so it's fully secure but it's just a little bit
weird the first time you do it because normally you never
let go of those handles. I plunge down, get it into position and then the whole time I'm down like this looking at the work as I'm going through. This is the one time we're
breaking some of the rules that normally we never
even think about breaking, and letting go of the handles
is one of those things with the router.
In this case, this just does not give
me nearly as much control as when my palms are resting on the base and on the workpiece at the same time. (lively country music) (lively country music) (lively country music) For the stem piece you
want to use a dark wood. Walnut works well but I find that wenge has that nice, very barky, woody look to it that looks very natural to me. I'm just gonna use this
little strip of wenge. Same exact process in terms of using the tracing paper
and the carbon sheet there, but the one problem is it's
gonna be hard to see this because it's pencil on a brown surface. I can't show it to you on camera, it's not gonna come out very well but if you just trace it
with your pencil it's fine and remember if the surface
is a little bit jagged, how many stems have you ever seen that are perfectly smooth? A lot of times they have those little branch outs on them and
little knobs on them.
There's nothing wrong with a stem that looks a little bit jagged like that. Do the best you can, cut out the rough shape and you should be good to go. Without a doubt this is going to be the hardest one to fit, and even when you are pretty darn close it's still gonna give you
some trouble in some areas. Usually what I wind up
doing is taking a scraper and relieving the back end. We're using sandpaper to do this just to create that little
bevel like we did before. You just don't want to go too far because you could very
easily loosen the fit without realizing it. At some point here you may be tempted and I certainly am to do what is like basically a leap of faith. By putting glue in here. Putting this right in position and very carefully tapping down with a block over top. What you're gonna do is
force it down into place. Give it a nice tight fit. The risky run here is if there's any wood that's really in the way that you shouldn't have done this to, you could easily snap part of the stem.
But again, that's why it's
called a leap of faith. I'm pretty confident that it's gonna go in with no problem and we're gonna go for it. No guts no glory I guess, right? You really do want to make sure that you relieved enough material that it will wedge itself in place and not just break because at this point breakage would be pretty much disaster. Okay with block. A couple hits with the hammer.
(tapping) (tapping) And it's in. I do have a little bit of a gap right in here behind the stem and right in the middle there. I've got some dust in the way. There's a little hairline gap there. What you can do for that is very similar to what we did before. A lot of variation to how
you can handle these things. I'm gonna create some sawdust. Make sure it's kind of packed
down in that area there and grab a little bit of thin CA glue. Drip it on the surface. Any place you think you might have a gap. Essentially the CA glue
absorbs into the wood dust and fills those holes with the appropriate color of material.
Just a final scraping here just to clean off any excess glue. Make sure it's nice and
flat level with the surface. If you want to see it really come to life we'll hit it with a
little mineral spirits. Not bad, huh? I don't know if the shakers would approve of an inlay on top of one of their tables but I sure like it. Thanks for watching. (lively music).