Having been inspired by a whole bunch a wood wall art projects that I’ve seen everywhere. I really thought it was time to give it a go myself. What I was really surprised by was the secret learning curve that was within this innocent project.
In the video, I explain how to get perfect fitting wood art / inlays through some very simple testing and understanding the difference between offset and scale.
I would love to see and hear your own experiences with this and if you found this video helpful or if I missed anything. I really want to make great content for the awesome community.
Links to all the files are in the description of the video here
Unfortunately not, video is my preferred documentation process at the current moment. Would written down be more valuable to you? If so just out of interest could I ask why?
OK so at double speed it was a reasonable pace (for me, who is already fairly well versed on inlay), and is not a bad entry level inlay/kerf adjustment video. You don’t touch on flipmating (which is arguably the right call here because of your design – the hex pattern would struggle with that technique due to the layout of the pieces (I call it the three-edge problem, but I am still workshopping that) but I would say that one improvement is that your results will look best (well, that’s subjective. It would have a less noticeable gap is more accurate) when you place the pieces “face down” due to laser cut profile.
I understand the economics of youtube, so the fact that you do a “hey guys” and ask for subscribers first is a necessary evil. I am not your target audience (I don’t do my learning on youtube) so I skipped right over it. (slightly off topic) I’ll admit that it does seem somehow off to take what you learned for free [presumably here] and try to monetize it, but hey, you put in some good effort on making the video, why not get compensated if you can.
Agreed with the flipping - we’ve talked a lot about that in other posts and I’ve learned quite a bit from those discussions. Recently the Nespresso box I made benefited from this as I cut the walnut normal, but then flipped the maple cutout in AutoCAD before plotting to PDF then cut / flip when assembling. Certainly gets a much better result that way! Keeping it straight in your head is the difficult part for me.
Just in general because it’s video. I don’t watch “news”, for example. If I find a story and discover it’s just video, I’ll go search elsewhere for a written article.
Well… to be fair this is more dedicated to the wood wall art side of things, once again subjectively I thought that most would want to have a little line left to see the difference of the pieces but this could be really wrong on my part. Your 100% right with the flipping due to the 3d shape of laser kerf. I’m going to be doing a video going into a lot more detail about laser kerf in the future. I’m glad that it was a least bearable for you to watch, as I understand for some videos are tedious.
Thanks for asking about compensating hard work. Well, to be perfectly honest, I’m into building a community and audience with truly providing value to them, way and beyond providing monetary value to me. I know with time I’ll be able to make some thing from it all, from dedicated viewers through patreon or a few other means. The way I see it. I can make what $30 selling 10 of these files cheaply in the next few days… OR I give them away for free, you feel good, I feel good. You then tell a friend about me that might like my content and then they use a different file from another video too and the circle of positivity goes on.
Thank you so much for the feedback and insight to what I have missed.
I watch videos to see what is possible. I read howtos to see how it is possible. Getting that balance down between showing a workflow and not getting bogged down in the minutiae of technique is tough. The former gets more views in my experience.
Thank you all for all the comments, suggestions and feedback.
I currently cant edit the post but I would like to put this here for any future on lookers.
PLEASE NOTE:
If you want to have 100% perfectly matching “inlay” you need to flip pieces over… I’ll be doing a more in-depth video in the future about this, If you would like to be notified when this comes out my youtube channel is just a click away.
Disagreed. Access to this forum has a hefty buy-in cost. We all bought lasers and we all capitalized and monetized skills that other people taught us throughout our lives, in order for us to have employment or financial access to afford lasers.
I think some of it’s about learning styles. ADHD is the issue for me. I don’t watch TV, because I just can’t sit still that long with nothing for my hands to do. If I watch a tutorial video I have to turn on closed captions and speed it up to 2x, or my mind wanders off before it even gets to the important stuff. It’s not necessarily that I’m any better at staying focused on written instructions, but when it’s all there in front of you, you can skim the parts you don’t need and go back and reread the parts you do, and pick out just the parts you want.
Don’t let it be a criticism of your preferred medium, though – for every one of us who aren’t that excited about videos, there are probably a hundred others who want exactly what you’re giving them.
It’s not necessarily that I’m any better at staying focused on written instructions, but when it’s all there in front of you, you can skim the parts you don’t need and go back and reread the parts you do, and pick out just the parts you want.