Inlay into non-metalic background

The three items in the first photo show two good examples of 19th century items, where both silver and gold are set into tortoise shell. This can be done without carving the tortoise shell, as it will yield and deform with controlled heat, as the metal is pressed into it. I think you will agree the results are very nice.

The third item is my copy of part of an 18th century original flute by the Frenchman, Bressan (now in the London V and A Museum). For scale, this flute part is 95mm long. This has silver inlay into ebony, which cannot be set in with heat! Instead the wood has to be precisely cut, with grooves that are about .012 inch wide but need to be five times deeper to hold the metal. Notice the wood flute piece has tight scrolls that cannot be done with the knife approach used on gun stocks having gentle curves, not with stabbing chisels which can work well with gentler curves.

I promised John B that I would show my technique for doing that but have not yet dug out my tooling to set up and photograph.

I am sure that Tortoise shell is now protected, rightfully so, but there could be big chunks of it around in the second hand stores and it is workable to other shapes.

These techniques may tickle the muse of knife, or buckle engravers, etc?

best

Rod

Beautiful looking inlays Rod. I would be VERY interested to know the technigue for inlaying intricately into wood like that.

Thanks,
Peter

i believe this is possible in cow and perhaps buffalo horn. a friend would "heat treat" these materials with hot water and steam from a kettle. in doing so the material would become very much like soft , pliable rubbery stuff, and could be formed to whatever shape wanted. when it cooled off, it kept its' new shape. he also formed a crude thread shape in the narrow end of some of the horns, and created a unique screw on tip that also acted as the powder measure.

Rod, over the years of making tools and pool cues I have developed a few methods for inlaying metal into wood and ivory. The ivory plane has sterling inlays both flat and on a radius. I start by making the female cavity first, this can be done by hand,with a pantograph or with a CNC mill. The cutter has a 4 or 5 degrre taper thus the sides of the cavity have a positive draft. After the cavity is finished and clean I spray a light coat of silicone mold release and then press brown sculptures wax into the cavity. The surplus wax is trimmed and left a few thousands proud ,then using an ice cube I rub the wax to harden it. The wax is then blown out of the cavity and investment cast with the metal of choice.
The casting is then inserted into the cavity and either epoxied in or mechanically secured from the rear if size and geometry allow. Because the fit is so precise the epoxie usually is all that is required.
The photo of the bronze inlayed into wood is flat ,the inlay in the round delrin was an early test for inlaying names into the butt of a cue stick. Once I perfected the process I was able to inlay script diagonally around a cues butt piece with the script lettering about .030 wide.
Paul

Paul's remarkable inlays!

Paul,

That ivory plane and the other inlays are jaw-droppingly great! Thank you so much for showing these, quite an inspiration, and for your technique summary. I wrote some time ago about my technique for ebony on Steve Lindsay's forum.

Here is a flute based upon an original from 1720 by Bressan. I made it some years ago and it is owned by the prof of flute in Amsterdam Conservatory.

The average line thickness is about .014 inches and thinest is .007 inches.

Best

Rod

Rod, I've held your work in my hands and you've explained the process to me. Still, I am in awe of the work you do.
Great stuff, old boy!
Brian

Paul and Ron, That some very nice work...
Paul has explained how he applied his inlay and I would love to hear and see yours...
Thank you both for showing...
Jerry

Paul, Jerry, and Peter,

Thank you for your interest in my inlay into ebony and other woods! Paul, your technique is very impressive and the results are stunning!

Some time ago, on The Lindsay Forum, I wrote a reply to John B giving a brief description of the technique I use. For convenience, I repeat the post below. I had promised to dig out my apparatus and show a picture of it, but have so far failed to take the time to do this, sorry. Here is what I wrote ...

Dear John,

Thank you for your posting, asking me to describe, as promised, my approach to inlay into wood flutes!

I am just back from teaching Scots songs at a Fiddle camp in the Sierra mountains due east of me. It was a great week with a huge concert last Friday in Grass Valley, and with about 160 players on stage. I am nursing my mosquito bites but generally feeling pretty good about the whole event.

I will soon put my apparatus back together again and take a few pictures for the forum, but in the meantime, a few words....

The original flute, made in 1720, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It is covered in inlayed silver scroll work that is quite tight with many very small radii in the scroll work, and as I said the normal gentle curve approach, and also stabbing chisels, do not work for these patterns. The silver line thickness is mostly .007 -.018 inches wide, and the grooves in the wood need to be about four or five times deeper than the widths in order for the silver to stay in,

You and I can easily route or end mill a slot in wood or metal that is five times deeper than its width, provided we are dealing with relatively wide slots, say, 1/4 to 1/2 an inch wide. But as diameter goes way down to try to mill a deep slot that may be as little as .007 in wide, the router or end mill is hopelessly weak and snaps off as soon as we try to go deep. Chances are that the original technique did not use that approach, so first let us speculate how they did it in the old days? I said that the very tight radii mean that stabbing chisels do not work. They are effective in gentler radii. These chisels are like a tiny sharp edged nail driven into the wood and slowly moved along the curve. In a tight scroll, the side forces simply split the wood off, and all is lost. So how the heck was it done on the original? The only simple technique that shows promise, and that does not unduly strain the side wall of the groove, would be to use a tiny 'bow' drill to drill a series of holes to follow the groove shape. With very many holes drilled side by side, the wood could be teased out between the ajacent holes to form a deep slot into which flat strips of silver could be painstakingly inserted, edge up, and then glued and finally filed and polished to give a crisp silver line appearing at the surface. Easier said than done, as once the grooves are made the silver needs to be formed into the scroll patterns and also bent to conform to the round surface of the flute. This means bending the shaped silver on its difficult wide dimension. This is the best I can up with as the original technique, and I would be very interested in other ideas about this? In the old days there were plenty of very good artisans who would work for months on some fancy piece for a Lord or a Lady, and who could be engaged for very low wages. Even in my own case, as appentice toolmakers we were paid $2 a week at Rolls Royce while doing a man's job! So time was of not much consequence in the early days.

In today's world, we all aspire to become as rich as , say, a plumber in practicing our craft ... few do. I wanted to see if I could model this old flute but make a limited addition of half a dozen or so. I thought about what might be the best approach. The first thing was to master cutting very narrow and deep grooves in wood with very tight turns. Many tests failed with the cutters breaking instantly, until I remenbered that certain band saws will cut on friction and heat alone without having teth, if the speed is high. This led to my first breakthrough. Many of use high-speed dental handpieces of the 400,000 rpm category for various applications around the bench. Taking the smallest dental 1/16" friction grip burs, and diamond grinding them to straight cylinders of about .015 in diameter, then adding some teeth, I experimented with trying to cut deep grooves but again they fell apart instantly. After all, making teeth on these tiny pieces meant reducing their strengh. Then, I thought, why not try cutting on friction only, making use of the handpiece's very fast speed? We know that the dentist does not want a broken bur to go shooting off and embedding itself in a patient's cheek, so we can be sure that dental bur metallurgy is the best for hardness, and strength. I mounted some used carbide 1/16 burs in my lathe collet and diamond-ground them down to tiny straight cylinders, then used these in the dental handpiece. They appeared to cut nice grooves using only friction at the full speed of the handpiece. What's more, they lasted for quite a long time if you did not try to cut too fast. Under the microscope, the gooves could be deep and sharp edged, with no sign of any big burn-back at the groove boundary. The extremely low thermal inertia of the tiny bur meant that things cooled of rapidly just beyond the groove. Okay, that was one part of the problem that had some promise. If I could cut deep, narrow grooves, next thing to look at was whether I was going to layout the design on the flute and cut them by hand holding the handpiece, or ....

I opted for another approach. I wanted to make a few of these fully ornamented flutes, so chose to do the art work separately. After studying the patterns it showed that many of the designs were repeated four times around the circumference in a seamless fashion. Others were used only once. The approach that worked was to lay the patterns out four times larger than life, and carve the grooves onto a series of large "postage stamps" and they use these with a special linked apparatus, I used a 4/1 pantograph linkage to reduce the designs to life size and cut them onto the actual flute. In a later post I will show a picture or two of the apparatus. When you first think about a four times bigger flute as the master, you have to think about a big flute that is 8 feet long! The pictures will show how that was avoided and the whole home made apparatus was only about 20 inches by 12 inches and about 14 inches high. total cost of materials apart from the handpiece was about $30, including the pantograph.

The resulting grooves were so accurate, that I explored two ways of filling them. One with silver flat wire, and the other using very high silver amalgam. You will recognize that filling the grooves with amalgam will only look good if the grooves are very accurate, since the filled amalgam shows how neat or sloppy the ditch has been cut. But you can cut a somewhat sloppy ditch and insert a silver wire of even thickness. After filling your ditch with, say, superglue, and filing the silver wire flush, all that is seen is a nice even silver line and all the uneven groove is filled in with more or less invisable glue ... no so with amalgam.

Both techniques worked well and I have a test piece where one side is solid silver and the other is silver amalgam. Most people cannot pick which is which unless they use a microscope.

Dentists do not like to use high-silver amalgams to fill your teeth. They use low silver, as this is more crunchier and keys well to the tooth. But dental students who want to do their lab work examinations and have it look really good use "spherical" high-silver amalgams. These shine splendidly, like solid silver.

I need to break off here and make a flute, but will try to get the pictures to show you in the next instalment?

best wishes!

Rod

Brian,

I saw your smiling face on photos of this year's Grand Masters, and I note you are still playing that 12 stringer! I have good memories of last year's pickin' and strummin' sessions including Ron Smith, and a whole bunch of us. I will attend Diane and Ron's GRS class Nov 5-9, and I will be packing a guitar and maybe mandolin in hopes that Ron will also come equipped, and maybe some others? I know Tira will bring a flute and whistle, so it could be fun after hours. Will you be there by any chance?? I hope so!

best

Rod

Rod,
Thanks for the explanation Rod. I would say one would need some very good skills and some specialized tools to accomplish that intricate level of inlays. Your work illustrates those skills well.

Peter

Paul, Jerry, and Peter, and John B,

I got to dig into my pile of various inventions and found the apparatus... but it is missing some parts. So I set up what I found, to give you an idea of my approach, and enclose three photos.

The cost of the rig was seven bucks ... a used pantograph from a second hand tool store, plus about twenty years of thinking about it, since I first examined the original flute in London.

I made about 14 elements that make up the general design, carving them in a slabs of essentially a four times bigger flute. One little "lathe bed" holds the flute part, and missing on the photos was another parallel lathe bed holding the oversize elements. The pantograph is missing an ordinary dental high speed hand piece, but you see the hole that it should fit into, to hold the tiny toothless cutter.

When all elements are in place the work piece is up nearer the pantograph. The lathe vertical slide was borrowed to hold the pantograph, because that allows me to raise and lower the tool, and set its depth of penetration, and also withdraw cleanly.

Let me know if you are scratching your head, and I will fill in any other details.

Finally, how would you do it, even spending more that seven bucks? You may have a very different idea on how to go about this that would get me thinking outside my box ... always a good exercise

best

Rod

Rod,

That is down right inspiring. Very impressive ingenuity too.

Ray

Rod, Sorry, but I won't make Ron & Diane's class. After two weeks at Grand Masters, my work load is too much.

I know Ron will bring his gitfiddle and I'm sure going to miss the after hours sessions.
Maybe you can play "My Home in the Green Hills"(my favorite Scottish tune) in my absence.

Last year was a real blast and the memories are just as vivid as they were a year ago.

Next time we can all get together, I'll try to get my drum set out there. I've been playing them for 37 years....That doesn't mean I'm good at them, just better at the drums than I am on the guitar. (I only have a year and a half on the guitar)

Can't wait to see the next photos of your flute work...it is truly amazing.

Aye, Laddie...Cheerio
Brian

Thanks, Ray,

So is your DVD, which I am enjoying! I would like to send you my DVD of making a special flute in my Scottish workshop... no charge, just a thank you. I send them to buddies, for fun. I will find your mailing address from your web page. The flute was made in solid ivory from old billets I had sitting around for twenty years. Now we use imitation ivory. Maybe Paul would also want to see that, as he has worked in ivory. There was a time, not too long ago, when many old-style flute players wanted ivory instruments. Scotland was full of old Indian tusks, from the days of the Empire, not to mention a million billiard balls.
Now most of my flutes have silver rings or imitation ivory. As you know there are huge hoards of ivory stacking up in warehouses, since what the elephant desperately needs is more land, safe corridors to migrate, and instead it is being confined to national parks that quickly over-populate, resulting in whole elephant families having to be culled, sadly.

So having used imitation ivory for decades, I though I would finish up the old billets, and document the technique on film, as a future reference, hence the DVD.

best

Rod

We will be thinking of you, Brian!

Rod,
Thanks for the post. I would say the greatest factor in accomplishing the inlays you do is YOUR skill and ingenuity. I have done some inlays of various materials in wood and antler over the years but it is very basic compared to your flutes.

I do a lot of hiking and due to the associated costs to dispose of large waste items at our "transfer station", someone that didn't want to pay to dispose of a full sized piano, dumped it in the woods. Much to my surprise, the keys were veneered with ivory which I was able to remove very easily in the winter temps when I discovered it.

The pieces are great for inlaying and I was hoping your technique may improve upon my manual process.

Your utilizing the pantograph arm was very clever indeed!

Thanks again,
Peter

Please do have a go, Peter!

The hugely import thing, if you want to do patterns that have tight turns, is that you have to go about five times deeper than the slot width. This is easy if the slots are wide, but when you are down at about .010 in to .015in, the delicacy of a cutting tool is the problem ... they would break in a second. hence very high speed, no teeth, and cut by friction. Try this easy test, if you have a dental hand piece of the 350,000rpm type, and friction grip 1/16 in shank. Mount a small tungsten friction grip dental bur in the hand piece, have it spinning at speed and hold against a rotating 1200 or 600 grit diamond lap on your graver grinder. Don't let it heat up, but soon you will diamong grind all the teeth off, and keep grinding it down on the first 1/8 in of its length until the tiny cylindrical stub gets to about .015 in ... just a simple cylinder with no teeth.

Now take a slab of that ivory, and gently hand cut a tiny groove, about .060 in deep or more, having the toothless bur "burn" its way along. In wood it works fine, there is no edge charring as the bur has almost no thermal inertia. Ivory is a kind of cellulose structure, and I know my flute reamers would stick to it, unless I cooled them with water regularly. The process may not work on ivory, but easy to try.

That said, look at the terrific results Paul has created with ivory, using his technique, on that wonderful plane! That sure works.

The photo below shows an early experiment, where I painted the ebony white, for contrast and hand-cut through the transparancy. However I soon opted for the pantograph approach, as I could hand cut the oversize slabs once, and get them right, then cut the flute designs many times. If your hand cut technique works, no matter how wobbly, then you can take the trouble to pantograph from bigger design layouts.

Let us know how it goes?

Anyone thinking of a new job? What about doing this kind of thing on the "frog" of violin bows?

All of this is not engraving, but thank you for your interest. It falls into the cusp of "ornamental results" and might have some application on knife handles, etc.

best

Rod

Thank you for some wonderful pictures, ideas and tutorial, Rod.
You are an international treasure.

Aye, sure Laddy Boyo. John B.

Rod I would love that.

My address is
Ray Cover
1206 N. Third Street
Festus, Mo 63028

I toyed with the idea of making cletic type keyless flutes at one time but figured the last thing I needed was one more hobby. My wife plays flute and clarinet and I have always had a taste for Celtic music. But...there are only so many hours in a day and only so many days in a week.

I am glad you are enjoying the DVD.

Ray

Ray,

i wrote to your web email for your address .... but here it is!

thanks

I will include some other stuff on DVD and CD to distract you and your wife on a slow day. Is there such a thing left in our modern busy lives? Technology does not deliver on its promise of more leisure, I regret!

best

Rod