My first marquetry project! I made a trivet

Very nice. Cool use of grain and colors. Just to clarify: looks like you did veneer on all the faces of the MDF, correct? I can’t quite tell. The top two pictures look like solid wood!

Thanks for posting?

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Seems to me there’s veneer on all of the faces. Otherwise it would have some very strange end grain! Also if you blow up the images you can see the veneer edges.

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I veneered all of the faces except for the bottom, which I applied cork to. I read that in order to keep pieces from warping over time you should veneer all faces, including the back. This is especially true if you are using something other than mdf as your backing, since it is more resistant to warping. I chose to risk it and leave it off the back because I was using the cork. It should still last quite a long time I believe.

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Yeah, that is something I would do differently in the future. I would veneer the sides first then cut the top to cover all of the side edges.

Do you mean for use when gluing?

I know basically what jigs are and how they are used, but it seems like it would take the same amount of time to find center for the cutting part of the job. I only needed to worry about that one time because only the large piece needed to be centered. All of the o there bits were cut as close to the edge of each piece of veneer as possible.

It would be handy to have a jig for gluing the assembled piece to the backing board, since the contact cement gel is not forgiving at all. I was able to manage it with this piece but with larger pieces it would be very difficult to get it aligned I’m sure.

Great job on the inlays. Can’t wait to see what you make next.

awesome! I noticed there are hot spots at the corners, if you put a TINY radius on the corners, the laser won’t decelerate and accelerate at the vector intersection. It just makes for a smoother cut in the end. (I do a lot of kind of work!)

There is an illustrator plug in script somewhere called "round any corner).

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I was wondering about that, thanks for the Intel!

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in fact, I almost always round the corners of ANYTHING I cut so the speed of the laser doesn’t change, just makes for a super nice cut.

Beautiful. Looks like your kerf adjustments paid off - this looks super smooth!