I made this box yesterday on my glowforge experimenting with wood inlay using a piece of wenge and bamboo and walnut veneers. Made a few mistakes the veneer was springy and had a bend in it and sprang up during the cut this combined with the ordering of the cuts gave me some interesting distortion in the first bits. I also didn’t make the etch deep enough so tended to burn through the top layer of the veneer when sanding it smooth.
Still fairly happy with the result and after sanding and some boiled linseed oil finishing it looked pretty good.
The wenge wood is really distinctive pattern and dark colour I got the sheet I used for this from inventables they have quite a few interesting woods to try.
Your boxes are terrific. Thought this might be of interest to you.
Project Description: This is for my granddaughter’s first Communion to hold her Rosary. The box is made from a single piece of Spanish cedar, hollowed out on a CNC . The inlay medallion was cut out on a Glowforge Pro laser. Hinges also cut on laser, drilled with number 68 drill, and joined with 1/32" diameter wire. The lid is held shut with hidden magnets.
Types of Wood Used: Spanish cedar, local holly, mahogany (probably Cuban) salvaged from a very old (c1830) but derelict family dinning table.
A comment about the inlay: I did the design in Vectric’s Aspire CAD/CAM. Aspire has a feature that allows any design to be offset either inward or outward. I offset the letters by .005" outward to get a pretty good fit. How did you achieve fit on your inlay? I exported design to PDF which preserves dimensions.
That is a beautiful job. I especially like the hinges. I would not have thought about doing them that way. Learned something new today. Thank you for sharing your design.
That’s a lovely piece of work and I love the idea of laser cutting the hinges I might have to try that myself next time I’m making something of that type.
In terms of offset in my inlays I used Inkscape to do that it has a mechanism for offsetting the vector by a given amount inwards. It’s a bit fiddly (which describes inkscape in general ) but seems to work and it can then export directly to svg.