First of all, thanks for the kind words.
And yes, that’s exactly right – I cut letters from both materials with the walnut ones being ever so slightly larger to fit snugly into the holes left behind in the maple. Here’s what some of the leftovers look like. I’ll probably use the maple letters that came out of the holes for another project, so I kept them.
You can even see where I tried to squeeze the Fa little too close to the edge of the walnut board and the camera alignment wasn’t as perfect as it could be. Oops.
It took a number of test cuts to get the kerf adjustment to the point where the letters were snug but not too tight to get into the holes. And even then, the letters required a little … encouragement (read, pounding) to get in place. I’m frankly lucky the maple piece didn’t split in the process.
The square with the S is one of my test cuts. It’s only 1.25" square so I was able to get quite a few tests done without using a whole lot of weirdly shaped areas in my scrap material pile. The S was chosen deliberately as a compound shape with some smaller and fragile serifs.
I could have gotten nearly the same effect by engraving in the maple and using walnut veneer, and I may try that next time. The only real reason I didn’t do that here is that I had it in my head that I wanted to inset the full thickness piece and I used cut vs. engrave time as my excuse to do it. In my defense, the results came out pretty good though. 