NWB WoodWorks

All Cleaned up!

Lately I have been working on a new piece and I am refining the production process to possibly to a small batch of these in the future.  The table has been complete for a few weeks, but after getting motivated by a fellow woodworker I decided to try my hand at decorative inlay.  I may not have started with an easy design but, I sure enjoyed the challenge I have always been drawn to the design of any compass rose. I have chosen a 16 point compass rose.  For me they have a form that is quite graceful yet bold. Keep in mind that all the material here is SOLID WOOD that I have milled to create this design.

You’ll have to forgive me for the lack of pictures with this first bit of work, things were working SO well that I forgot to pick up the camera…  It all starts with the bandsaw, I cut a number of veneers from larger stock.  I cut these very thin pieces of wood at about 3/32″ thick then sand them smooth.  Next I cut the veneers into triangles that have a 22.5 degree angle on them,  and in order to make the full circle I need 8 of them.  These pieces are then all glued together to look similar to a “pinwheel”.  Then through the process of many angled cuts with a marking knife, and some more glue ups we end up with the compass rose you see above running through the drum sander.  It measures roughly 6″ in diameter.

Marking knife tracing shape.

Next the rose is laid out on the table top in order to determine its final location and orientation.  Once I like where it is, I tape it down to the table top and begin to scribe around it with a marking knife.   Once I have gone all the way around the 16 pointed rose, the tape is removed and we begin to remove the material from the table.  This is done by, first taking the marking knife and making the previous cuts more pronounced; then using a chisel to pare away material on the inside of the shape up to the cutlines.

parring away up to knife line

This creates a “shoulder” that will ultimately butt up against the edge of the inlay.  This processes continues around the whole shape and until every where it is about 1/16″ below the surface of the table top.  It is important to keep these shoulders very crisp as and imperfections in them will show up later once things are in place and the glue has dried.

Routing out center waste

Next it is time to set up the router to hog out the majority of the waste material within the body of the inlay.   The router equiped with a 1/8″ spiral upcuting bit set to cut 1/16″ deep.  This makes short work of an otherwise time consuming task.  But once the router does the dirty work we still need to do a little clean up around the edges.

After the recess we created is clean and true, its time to test fit the compass rose into the table top.   With an hour or so of light sanding and some fancy chisel work we it fits very well!  Time for the glue up!

For this glue up I used a slow setting plastic resign glue that works well for applications like this.  First of all, it cures slowly

Compass Rose glued into table but awaiting clean up

allowing me time to “fuss” with the layout and configuration before the clamps are applied.  But also, this glue is much better at filling gaps than typical yellow glue.  So just in case there were a few spots where my cuts were not perfect, this glue would fill them.  The glue up went great and you can see how it look right out of the clamps.

The next task is clean up.  This was a task I might have complained about a year ago, but since my enlightenment to handplanes this task is simply a pleasure!  The inlay is roughly 1/32″ proud of the table surface at this point; so, 10 minutes work with my Lie Nielsen No. 62 the whole surface is flush!   Following this I pulled out my smoothing plan to take care of any tearout issues present.  And here is what you get:

All Cleaned up!

The mahogany, tiger maple and flame birch really work well together and once they get a finish on them will really POP!  I’ll post some pictures once the table is compolete

Thanks for reading

-NWB