I made my first foray into V carve inlays this week with help in no small part from @chips and his post.
I was able to follow the instructions laid out almost exactly but had to change Op4 from a 2D pocket into a Contour pass. I believe this was due to my choice of v bit. My v bit comes to a perfect point with no land and Fusion got really excited when it tried to do a pocketing operation with a bit with a diameter of zero at the tip.
I noticed a few spots that didn’t quite nest as well as I would have hoped, so I think I’ll experiment some more with a different ratio besides the 3:2:1.
I also dissected my test piece because I was curious how deeply the male and female parts were nesting. It doesn’t look quite like the male is 2/3 the height of the female pocket so I’m not sure what I did wrong there. Maybe my problem with the ratio was user error instead of procedural.
Very nice - I haven’t tried inlays in Fusion, but I don’t think the process is too different from V-carve. This V-carve tutorial is what I’ve been following: The VCarve Inlay Technique - YouTube
From your cross-section, it looks like you have a depth off - a gap would let the male piece fit in more snugly and reduce the change of gaps.
I think you are right. There is a small gap (hard to see because it’s full of epoxy) that’s about half the height of one of the plywood layers. Ideally I’d like a little more wiggle room at the bottom.
I think my male piece needs to be cut a bit wider.
I’ve been playing around with veneer inlays, much harder to get nice tight joints. But I’m using fully dyed 1/16" thick maple so either I would have to glue multiple layers together and hope the glue line doesn’t show up. I did get a sheet of pink to make a sign for the grandkids that I might try to stack it so I can do a V carve.
I did some straight inlay with a 0.05mm offset that turned out pretty good! I have read about using water to swell the inlay while the glue is still wet to get a tighter fit, but I’ve never tried it.
I couldn’t find white dyed wood in 1/16" thick so I got some 1mm stuff. I glued it with Titebond II to some red maple to build it up. When I sliced it to the correct thickness the next day it curled up like crazy. Clearly the Titebond must have some water in it and the different types of wood reacted it reacted differently. I spritzed some water on the inside of the curve and within minutes it flatten and then started to curl the other way. Being so thin water has a huge effect.
I’ve been using epoxy to glue the inlay into the work. I’m getting it down pretty good so there’s not much of a gap. But it seems like even the epoxy will cause the wood to swell some.
Very nice post, appreciate you taking time and effort to dissect the inlay with F360. Would you have any additional insight now? @chips did a stellar job on his write up for the process, I’m still trying to figure it all out, can’t wait for the first true fit! Thanks again.
rdb
