Looking for new way to outline inlays.

[fscotte]

I've been outlining inlay with a white pencil, but it just isn't precise enough for my taste. I was thinking maybe spraying some kind of white paint with an airbrush to create a good clean outline. How do you guys do it?

[David Newton]

Lightly glue the inlay on the wood. Scribe around the inlay with a very sharp metal point. The white pencil is used to fill the scribed line, then scrape away the excess to leave a "scribed white line"

[Graham McDonald]

A tube of white poster paint from your local art supply store, smear on with a fingertip, hold or spot glue the inlay and scribe around with a bradawl. Rout out inside the line with a Dremel and insert inlay. More or less the same as David, but the other way around.

cheers

[David Newton]

Graham. So you are routing to a dark line on a white background? I'd like to try that.

[fscotte]

I guess my issue is with the scribing part. I am not a good tracer. That's why I was thinking about airbrushing on some kind of white paint which should provide a clean precise edge around every crevice of the inlay. Wouldn't know if I needed to use a special paint or not?

[ellisppi]

After painting with white tempra, I would suggest outlining the inlay with a technical pen, not a scribed line. With a tech pen, you have a line thickness of your choice .3mm, .5mm, etc. With a scribed line, when you rout the scribe away, you no longer know where you are. With a pen line, you can rout away half the line and still have a reference where you are.

[belbein]

I've done it pretty much all the ways described here ... now on my third inlaid instrument, my cavities still aren't as tight as I'd like. But I have learned a few things.

1. David's right. You have to glue the inlay down. Holding it does not work, no matter how strong you are.
2. The real difficulty is in the routing inside the lines. That's where I've made all of my mistakes. The best I can suggest is that you rout to within an indentifiable smidgen of the lines. Then scrape with an Xacto or miniscraper. This is going to take forever, but put on some good music and zone out while you hand scrape.

Last thing I discovered ... it's a lot easier to assemble an inlay of many pieces outside of the instrument, and then inlay the whole thing at the same time. A lot fewer and more manageable cuts, if you've laid it out well. But then I'm addicted to complicated inlays.

[Michael Lewis]

Get and use a head band magnifier. Take your time and make sure you do a careful job, and when you remove the magnifiers your work will look pretty good.

When you get into a rush, take short cuts in judgement, or just force through the job your work is very likely to suffer.

[David Newton]

Almost as important as the accuracy of the routing, is the color of the filler.
A good choice of filler can make a bad rout almost invisible.
Because wood comes in variable colors, 7 I think, a new filler color has to be invented for each one.

[Darryl Wolfe]

After painting with white tempra, I would suggest outlining the inlay with a technical pen, not a scribed line. With a tech pen, you have a line thickness of your choice .3mm, .5mm, etc. With a scribed line, when you rout the scribe away, you no longer know where you are. With a pen line, you can rout away half the line and still have a reference where you are.

This^....

[fscotte]

Well I decided to glue the inlay on with rubber cement, and then airbrush some Clearex white modeling paint over it. It reminded me of white out and washes off easily with water. The results were quite nice and vastly less tedious. My only mistake was getting rubber cement on the peghead outside of the inlay which in turn caused for some rough edges when I tried wiping the cement off with my finger. But the paint sticks quite well to the peghead.