Marquetry test

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Hi,

I want to make a marquetry inlay in wood from an image I commissioned (styled in a antique greek vase). Here is a too scale crop out of the eye. marquetry test

Is it possible with the glowforge to make in 2 piece (Wenge and Padauk) if not, what would be best to recreate the style? engrave the padauk then black acrylic pour? Wenge cutout in a padauk pour? Negative or positive engraving? increasing the size of the “line” too have better chance (would reduce the size of the eye)

Update here is my first test.

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I can’t see it. :thinking:

The file is the white space between my text

When you load an SVG file, it comes in really small but says what the size is. You can add a zero or two at each number to make it easier to see (it does not affect the size of the file if downloaded)

This is an eighth inch cutout in a 3/16 piece of wood,

The one you engrave is the one with many pieces .

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What you’re asking about is usually referred to as inlay on the forum, and there are lots of threads about that.

It’s hard to know what level of advice to give here, I’m not sure of your existing skill set. The bottom line is that this can be tricky to get right but it’s entirely doable.

Topics you’ll want to read about:

  • Inlay
  • Kerf adjustment
  • Path manipulation (aka node editing)
  • Flip-mating
  • Vector conversion of a raster image (if you’re starting with a raster)

If any of this is new to you I’d suggest searching the forum and seeing what it’s about. After that if you have direct questions I’m sure we’ll have direct answers.

One thing that is very useful is hard to search for, so I’ll drop it here.

And lastly as for padauk and wenge, they look outstanding together. Check out the “shockwave” design in this post:

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Hi, I am quite new to inlay, but not to kerf adjustment. I usually do thigh pressure fit furniture/ assembly, but it was more the process to obtain the smallest pieces/ make the holes for them without losing them to the crum tray.

This piece has only a couple of “inner pieces” while my design above has a great many. So while it could be done with the cut-through technique the engrave and cutout might be easier. Moving forward to more complex designs the double-cut-through technique quickly gets really crazy.

double-cut-through technique ?

engrave and cutout?

I haven’t seen those/ know what they mean (I can translate that it is to cut with 2 pass to reduce kerf?)

and what I shared is only an extract from a full size character (not shared for copyright reason).

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If you have a complex design you figure out which is base and what is pattern (the pattern is usually a single piece with lots of holes)
The pattern you cut out of very thin material, while the base is engraved at exactly the same design to the thickness of the part you cut so it has to be thicker material by at least a sixteenth inch. I have found that engraving has less kerf than cutting so having them the same usually takes a rubber hammer on a flat part to force the layers together. I would use a light bit of glue as the pieces will dance in the moonlight and might drift apart otherwise. It will take some sanding etc. to make the levels exactly the same unless you don’t want them the same like this piece…

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I was more planning to cut each out of identical thickness boards (1/8) but to mirror one of them so the kerf angle cancels out. Is it a good idea?

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Yup.

That’s flip-mating. You’ll need to kerf adjust by a bit, (usually 0.006" ish for most 1/8" materials).

I’d say make a small test piece to see how it fits before you put it in your final piece.

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This^^. You can adjust your file by thousandths, so test to get the exact fit you’re looking for before committing large pieces of material.

Update in first post

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