A spot of mother of pearl inlaying.

[Wal]

I've just recently finished this project for a local guitar builder. He tends to supply his fingerboards as flat oversized stock which I'll pocket about a millimetre deeper than the pearl thickness and then he sands down to where he needs the surface/radius etc. So as it is, it's not a finished piece, just my CNC bit.

Cutters used for the wood were 2mm (for a rough pocket with about .15mm allowance) then a 1mm followed by a .5mm for the detailing around the profiles - these were programmed as being .06mm undersized to give a bit of clearance for the mother of pearl shapes to drop in.

I superglued the pearl blanks down to a plate of aluminium, scanned that in, then (in Illustrator) positioned the vector shapes where I needed them to fall on the blanks and added a datum at the bottom left which I matched with my x/y zero in CAM and in turn zeroed off my machine at that corner too. It's reasonably accurate, but you can get a bit of a shift if what you've scanned isn't sat flat on the scan bed - here the alu plate was nearly a couple of mm off the surface due to the pearl blanks, so its relative position to the pearl blanks wasn't represented exactly in the resulting scan. At this scale it's no big deal, but if you're going right to the edge of a blank it pays to check that your tool isn't riding off the edge at some point in the cut - if it is, just tweak the x/y zero on the machine.

The nice thing about supergluing to the aluminium plate is that, once cut, you can boil the whole assembly for 5-10 minutes and once cooled the pieces separate from the plate with just a gentle nudge - exactly what you want with the more delicate pieces.

Anyway, some pics of the results:



Wal.

[phill05]

Real nice job Wal that will look impressive on the finished piece.

Phill

[EddyCurrent]

Yes, very nice indeed. You have to watch the dust from that and the wood, don't be breathing it in.

[Wal]

Yes, very nice indeed. You have to watch the dust from that and the wood, don't be breathing it in.

Cheers guys. Yep, I hear you Eddy - wore a respirator for the pearl, although I'm in the market for one of those dust filters - something like this:

http://www.axminster.co.uk/jet-afs-5...RoC8pQQAvD_BwE

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[the great waldo]

Cheers guys. Yep, I hear you Eddy - wore a respirator for the pearl, although I'm in the market for one of those dust filters - something like this:

http://www.axminster.co.uk/jet-afs-5...RoC8pQQAvD_BwE

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Hi Wal

This might save you a few bob http://www.rutlands.co.uk/pp+woodwor...filters+d01110 but Mekanik is right about catching the dust at scource. By the way nice work on the inlays. Do the cutters last long as the pearl is fairly abrasive.

Cheers

Andrew

[Wal]

Hi Wal

This might save you a few bob http://www.rutlands.co.uk/pp+woodwor...filters+d01110 but Mekanik is right about catching the dust at scource. By the way nice work on the inlays. Do the cutters last long as the pearl is fairly abrasive.

Cheers

Andrew

Cheers for that link Andrew, yeah - a fair whack cheaper that..! It specifies being mounted at a height of 2m or greater. I'm in a vaulted cellar, so perhaps one of these filters isn't the best option for me. Not having given it a great deal of thought, I was hoping to pop it under an existing bench... but having my boiler etc. located down there, means that my cellar's pretty warm - a fairly constant 20℃ - I imagine the particles would be happy floating around on the warm air where that kind of filter would be most efficient in picking them off. At leg height it's probably doing its bare minimum...

I think that even a vacuum cleaner picking 'em off at source might struggle to contain these particles without a very decent filtration system - the cutters pulverize the stone and pretty much turn it into super fine talcum powder...

As pearl work is always small scale, I wonder if it's worth me making myself a little water tray fixture that traps the particles as they're cut..? Hmm... I wonder...

Wal.

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[Lee Roberts]

Looks nice, not seen any mother of pearl cnc machined on here before.

[mekanik]

Very nice Wal(as usual)
That filters OK but you would be better trying to catch it @ source so theres no chance of inhaling it. centrifugal setup on your vacuum might help.
Mike

[the great waldo]

Hi Wal
Where do you get your pearl cutters from ? and what kind of speed feed rates are you using. I liked your dream or die video. Was that an arbortech turboplane that your'e using.

Cheers

Andrew

[fwm891]

Well Wal, I've been playing around with the WorkBee for a while now here's one of the latest headstock inlays I've done...



The MOP inlay was cut with 0.5 and 0.3mm end mills, the wood inlays 1.3mm end mill. Feeds @ 20k rpm for the inlay circa 1.5 mm/sec with 0.3mm depth of cut. The wood inlay pockets were cut circa 5mm / sec 1.2mm depth. I remembered you saying about super gluing your MOP to an ali sheet and soak in boiling water to release the parts. I ended up super gluing to thin MDF and soaking in boiling water. The MDF just swells up and flakes away.