Inlay - first try

It’s not perfect. Mistakes were made; lessons were learned, but…
I have an inlaid truss rod cover for my octave mandolin!




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if that’s not perfect, it’s awfully good. Nice work.

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@evansd2 Thank you! :heart:

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(singing) janee’s got a glowforge - she makes pretty things.

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@Deleted Hahahaha

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That is very nice! Did you use actual shell or something else? I have not seen shell cut that way before,

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@rbtdanforth Thank you!! I found a very thin MOP veneer on Etsy. It was so thin, I basically treated it like cardstock.

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Likely a decorated plastic then. I did a lot of inlay with rocks and shells in silver but cut them with a jeweler’s saw. Lasers have a lot of trouble cutting things that don’t burn, so I was wondering.
:slightly_smiling_face:

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No. It is actual mother-of-pearl.

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@rbtdanforth Here’s a link. It is listed as genuine mother of pearl, and it was very fragile.

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Yeah thin mother of pearl cuts just fine. I’ve always suspected the laser causes it to crack along the cut line. Would be interesting to try it out and get a microscope on the edge to see what’s what.

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@evansd2 One of the things I learned was to offset my wood engrave rather than inset my veneer design. That’s what I did wrong here, and why you see a few cracks. Bits of the design were too thin to hold up. Also, it would have looked better anyway I think.

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i almost attempted some MOP veneer inlay on a fretboard recently, but i chickened out. i need to buy some and play.

it looks like the etsy seller suggests putting packing tape on top before cutting. did you use something like that before lasering it?

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Incredible that they could sell it in rolls :exploding_head: . I see the thicker stuff is made of tiles, but still finding places flat enough would be hard. I have always been a sucker for Paua shell and they do have several varieties. Very illegal to take from New Zealand but I have heard of a very similar species in Chile.

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@shop I would be nervous with a fret board too. I could be brave with the truss rod cover because I could just make another one. ha

I did not use any tape on top, it was too fragile. I tried using 3M adhesive on the back, but peeling the backing off destroyed the shell.

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@rbtdanforth Paua shell is lovely!

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ok, good to know about the 3M, i was vaguely thinking about that, too.

it’s mildly painful to eff up a fretboard, but at least it would be a pre-build neck, not something i stripped off of someone’s favorite guitar. it would still cost us $100 to replace it with another good neck, tho, so still mildly paranoid. i had a great use case, too (it was going to be skeleton fingers), but just couldn’t make myself do it yet.

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@shop Maybe try a mock-up on a damaged cast-off fret board first?

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i have a 3x24" piece of rosewood i’ll test on.

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@shop Please report back!!

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