…Mother of Pearl ‘Southern Cross’ inlay…
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- After the glue is hard the inlay is sanded flat…it’s finished!
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- The inlays are glued with a paste made from epoxy and wood dust
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- Test fitting the inlays- they should drop in without any force
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- A bit of work on the corners with a scalpel and they are ready for the inlays
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- After a second finer pass with a tiny 1/32″ cutter
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- A close up of the router in action
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- A mini router is used to make the channel
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- A scribe was used to score around the outline and the pieces are removed
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- The pieces are temporarily fixed in place for marking out
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- The mini spiral downcut router cutters leave a clean edge
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- Super glue and tweezers, mini router and cutters, scribe and scalpel, and a large chisel for prising off the peices
The guitar is now fretted and inlaid ready for finishing…
Sandy had mentioned some kind of Southern Cross inlay, so this is what I came up with. As luck would have it I had four of the stars left over from a previous project so only had to make the smallest one. I checked the relative brightness (magnitude) of each star to make sure I got them in the right place using the Wikipedia entry on The Southern Cross. Being from the Northern hemisphere I have never actually seen this constellation, so hopefully I can be forgiven for not knowing them by heart. I had to be slightly artistic with the exact placement to fit them around the tuners and logo, so please do not use this as a star map to navigate by or you may never be seen again!