If you like sci fi and haven’t started Raised By Wolves on HBO, boy are you in for a treat.
The religious faction (The Mithraics) are a bunch of awful patriarchal zealots, but they sure have great brand identity. I wanted to do an inlaid box and the Mithraic sun was an easy decision.
Notes:
In reality I wanted to make a box with an accent layer of inlaid wood. The entire box was built just to show that concept off.
The woods are a mix of 1/8" and 1/16" thick stock.
As usual I used wipe on satin polyurethane for my finish. Goes on easy and easy to hide defects.
It all started with this idea for a highly inlaid layer, I used a technique similar to the one I used in my heavily inlaid box, I inlaid the 1/16" accent layer first and then cut the shape out of the glued up inlaid piece. You need to be pretty solid on jigs and kerf correction techniques here, if you make it too tight, the 1/16" stuff will crack easily. Kerf gets thinner as material thickness decreases so your standard correction for 1/8" inch material will probably be too tight. Experiment first.
The lid with the mithraic sun is a little different from how I usually do things. I’m a fan of through-cut inlays, I don’t like to engrave pockets as it is usually too fiddly. I had some thin bloodwood, so I decided to try it as a pocket engrave. As you can see, the pocket has some dark fringing (wispy black discoloration near the rays of the sun), probably due to my efforts to clean the surface of the maple after engraving. Regardless of the cause, through-cut inlays never give me this problem, so I will likely go back to my standard methods next time. In reality you can’t really notice the fringing when you have it in your hand, it just looks like a crisp engrave… but I know.
So yeah, that’s the box. Special shout out to @shogun for hooking me up with this nice piece of maple. And really, if you are info sci fi and aren’t watching Raised By Wolves, you are missing out.
Bonus (very tiny spoiler so blurring), here’s what the Mithraics look like. I mean COME ON, those outfits are outstanding.
i’d watch RBW (even more interesting because that was my bass player’s old band’s name), but HBO and amazon can’t seem to agree on streaming being allowed on the FireTV. so maybe if they ever come to an agreement i’ll give it a shot.
It’s a lovely box. A tiny bit disappointed it wasn’t filled with mithril though (I’m probably showing my age here, as I was not familiar with Mithraics).
Yeah I considered that. I really do think I should have masked it first and avoided having to clean the surface. Fact is I knew that a through cut on a simple shape like this was the right thing to do but I really wanted to use that Bloodwood, so idk.
In the end I still really like the outcome, so I’m going to call it a success
Would that require two separate operations? Such as, engrave and then score/cut as a separate run? I don’t know how I would have a line indicating score and another right on it indicating engrave. (Hey, I only just figured out the whole color thing for controlling actions.)
Generally yes. I’d do them back to back. I find that if you overlay two paths and have them both doing things (engraving or cutting) the UI software does unexpected things. I’d just convert it to cut with a low power as a second action.
