Maple inlay peghead logo [Pictures] - created 05-20-2011

Gramann, Bob - 05/20/2011.16:00:51
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This worked so well, that I thought I ought to share: For some silly reason, when I started building, I used Old English text for my logo. I have been make a decal of my name and placing over a pearl inlay that matched my bridge shape. I wanted to get rid of the pearl. I got this idea about inlaying my name in maple using laser cut letters. I explained it to Paul at Significant Signs (802-723-4566). He agreed to do it. I sent him a 5/64" thick piece of maple and a pdf file with the lettering in the size and typeface that I wanted. He burned the letters in relief and cut them out as you see here. (He made me a bunch at a very reasonable price--when I opened the envelope, it smelled like a campfire).

I cut out the recess for the letter block with a router being careful to save the dust.

The letter block in the recess looks like this.

Using the dust from the router and CA glue, I liberally filled over the letter block.

After sanding, pore filling with pumice, and shellacking, it looks like this. I am totally delighted with the result and now plan to avoid pearl on my instruments. And, it's faster than inlaying pearl.

OooH! Pretty!!

That looks great. I have also been thinkng about alternatives to shell, and this inspires me. Thanks for posting.

Nice! I will have to file that one away for future reference. Thanks for sharing.

Great tip Bob!

How on earth did you keep from breaking those spiderweb thin lines on the G and the A s?

It doesn't appear that you had any problem with the ebony dust being ground into the maple. Did you do anything special to seal it up before sanding? I've not been able to keep maple that clean unless I sealed it with CA first, and then used a scraper instead of sandpaper.

That really looks good, and on ebony would be invisible.

The laser engraver did the fine lines. That's the beauty of that method. The background is EIR, not ebony. I used CA to glue the EIR dust back into the letters. After I sanded the glued dust off the top of the letters, I did a final scrape with a razor blade to clean the letters. And, the dust is not really dust but rather the shavings from the router. The particles are bigger than dust. I think that makes them more invisible after sanding since some of the sanded surface is wood.

Wow, what a great way to do that!!

Old English 800!!

Wow, it's amazing what can be done with lasers. And apparently, the technology is getting fairly affordable. You could even do it the other way round, with dark wood for the letters on a lighter wood face. Very nice!

If I might make one little suggestion: next time you cut the recess for the logo block, make it a nice straight rectangle. On a flat black ebony face, it might not show, but on the stripey EIR, the irregular recess is a bit conspicuous.

Hi Jason,

If a person filled with a contrasting fill then a geometrically shaped recess might work well.

Reversing the colors, inlaying dark wood into lighter wood, would be more difficult. It is easy to fill the background with dark material. Filling with light material, trying to match maple or something similar would be very difficult.

I guess the other way to go would be to laser cut the cavity in the peghead overlay and use a filler material for the logo.

I thought that I had heard that laser cutting dark wood is problematic. Years ago, I experimented with cutting the cavity and using a filler. The filler migrated along grain lines and gave a quite sloppy appearance. The beauty of the maple is the lack of pores.

Yeah! That is a classy way to go, I like it! I have a friend that has one of those laser cutters too!

I did another one into Macassar ebony. It looks even better.

While making builder's plates for organs, I came up with a technique that required no filler adhesive. I would laser the mortises into the background material, about 0.002 or 0.003 offset, and about 0.040" deep. Then in the lettering material, laser away the material surrounding the letters to about 0.060 deep out of 0.125 or so material. I would then glue the letters into the background while still connected as one large block. After the glue dried, the excess material backing the letters could be sanded away, leaving only the inlayed letters with no filler material, or funny shaped borders. Sorry, I don't have any images to show the process.

I never had any problems with dark woods because of the color. I did have problems using ebony because it was so dense. It would take as many as 6 times the number of passes of other woods.

When using engraving fillers, I would always finish the parts first, and laser into the finish. This may not be practical for assembled instruments, but worked fine for the control labels I was doing at the time.

Travis, if I understand your procedure, did you laser the letters in mirror image so they would be correct when inverted for insertion into the cavity?

Nelson

Alright Bob, now you're just showing off.

That looks seriously good.

Travis:

So unlike in Bob's case, you had your lettering reversed, right?

Nelson and Dennis:

Yes, my lettering was mirrored during the laser process. The "face" up while lasering would be buried in the mortise, and the final "face" was exposed by sanding away the excess material after gluing. This would be the "back" during the laser process.

Whoa!

Muy excellente!