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.