Inlay End Grain Boards - Lessons Learned

hey folks hope you are all having a great day today one of my favorite sayings is the best lessons learned are the lessons earned and what that means is by getting out there actually trying something and possibly failing that's when you will learn the most no don't get me wrong here you can learn a lot from the mistakes of others but by actually getting out there and doing it yourself that's when you're gonna learn the most it doesn't always have to be failure you can learn a lot by simply trying something new and that's the theme of this video in this project lots of lessons learned by trying something new but also lots of lessons learned by failure and not major failure as you'll see but there's a little bit of failure here with this project I'll go through the thought process at each stage and talk about the lessons learned the goal for this project was to create some nice end grain inlay cutting boards and I'm starting by cross cutting the rough sawn and maple and bubinga at my miter saw station now the inlay design that I'm going with is the Mississippi State University logo and these soup species are a good choice for the maroon and white university colors after cross-cutting each board is jointed on one wide face and one narrow face and then planed just enough to remove the rough sawn surface I wasn't going for a specific number just trying to get maximum yield by cleaning up the board to help randomize the end grain pattern I made a few rip cuts that the table saw to just give me more pieces to glue right back together now I know someone's going to ask about these green gloves they are tight-fitting nitrile I think I'm pronouncing that right nitrile gloves and I used them for better traction I'm going to hate when my hands are dry and cracki when you have dry and cracking hands you don't really have much traction so these are tight enough that I still get a and I still get the good tactile feedback of working with bare hands you know you want to be able to feel the wood as you're pushing it through a machinery but but also there they don't get in the way so they have a bunch of small little bumps that help with grip before gluing the boards back together I twisted them around to get an alternating grain direction on the end grain faces kind of like a smiley face than a frown face than a smiley face on a frown face and this is for two reasons number one just to give some visual randomization because the the under grin face is the face that will ultimately be seen and number two it's for long-term stability as the wood moves if you have all of the grain and in the same I guess if it's all nothing but smiley faces then odds are it's gonna bow and cup all in the same direction and you don't want that you want any movement to cancel each other out with the smiley face than found face and smiley face in front face and the glue up brings me to lesson learned number one don't use a lot of glue for the first glue up I don't know why but I always always always use way too much glue on just the very first glue up I know that I do this but I continue to do it for some reason it's just so wasteful and it's so messy it's a lot easier and a lot cleaner to add glue in places where it's needed then try and fumble around with all of the extra glue naturally I used a lot less glue on the maple board after letting the panels dry overnight I started the next day by planing them flat now the bubinga board it was just shy of 16 inches wide which is the maximum capacity of my planer so just a couple shallow passes through the planer is all it took very quick very easy the maple board on the other hand it was just a little bit wider than the capacity of my planer I think it was around 17 inches wide so I used the drum sander to clean up the glue squeeze-out as well as I think I had a one of the one or two of these boards shift which is it's no fun so you got a you know level out the board again and that's where lesson learned number two is use the correct tool for the job a drum sander should be used with the intention of sanding the surface and not with the intention of thicknesses generally speaking so you know the drum sander worked in this situation but it was incredibly slow which caused me to get too aggressive with the material removal because I'm and I am an impatient person and therefore ruin the sandpaper prematurely so in my case the correct tool for the job would have been my sanding machine it has a 24 inch wide cutting width so it would have been more efficient use of time as well as resources to use a wide spoil board surfacing bit to flatten the panel next each panel is crosscut at the table saw with a crosscut sled to establish one square end and with that freshly squared and against the fence all of these smaller strips can be cut notice two things here number one I'm flipping the board every time I run it through and that's to cancel out any type of accidental angle or accident accidental taper that I'm putting on all of the cut pieces and number two notice that I'm not leaning over the blade to remove the cut piece I know that sometimes it's unavoidable but whenever possible don't lean over the saw blade for obvious reasons it only takes just a small amount of effort to stand on the side before reaching over the material now I saved a little bit of each of the panels to cut into smaller strips for the inlay material and these pieces were cut about half-inch wide if I recall correctly with everything cut I laid out all the pieces to see exactly how much material I had and my original plan was to make just two end grain boards one large maple board and one large bubinga board but that changed here as I thought the bubinga board was just it was just a little bit too long it wasn't proportionate you know the proportions were wrong so I broke it up into two boards and I also took two strips out of the maple board with the intention of cutting them into four smaller strips to border each one of the bubinga boards but you'll see later on that I ended up not adding these then it's more repetition of gluing panels together but this time the pieces are rotated so that the end grain is facing up and this time I also got tired of using a brush so I switched over to a small roller which is what I should have been using from the very beginning when gluing together this many panels but the thinner inlay material is also glued up the exact same way after letting these glue ups sit overnight I started the next day by flattening the large maple panel off-camera at the drum Center which again I should not have been doing and just like the bubinga board the maple board just seemed a little too large it was all glued together so at this point I cut it into two smaller boards and finally on day four the inlay work can be started so the two bits that I'll use for this entire process are a 1/4 inch end mill to remove the bulk of the material and a 60-degree V bit to establish the shape of the inlay making a V carved inlay allows you to have sharp interior corners unlike a straight wall and like cut wood entirely with an end mill where you are limited on the interior corners by the radius of the bit used with the z-axis height set the bits can go to work cutting the inlay and first the bulk of the material is removed with the end mill whenever possible and then the actual shape of the inlay is established with the V bit you'll notice you'll notice a lot of fuzzy pieces here where the the V bit is cutting around the pockets I'll address that in just a little bit while the CNC was at work I was using the drum sander to clean up the bubinga boards letting the CNC do its thing while you do something else it's like having a cheap hourly employee who's always ready to go and doesn't show up late or drunk for work here you can barely see the msu design but this is the second maple board after it was cut and with the maple boards cut I turned my attention to the bubinga inlay panel first with the end mill and then second with the V bit now the amount of fuzzy ends here really made me start to wonder what the world was going on because I I didn't see that in all of my testing pieces but it only took a minute to break off the fuzzies with a flat screwdriver nothing nothing crazy and I'm really good at screwing up to simple things so I used a highly visible marker to let me know exactly where I need to cut while at the bandsaw and while at the bandsaw that leads me to lesson learned to number three and that is to just let the CNC do more of the work when cutting the inlays rather than making a simple rectangle around the inlay vector and letting the CNC cut all the waste to that rectangle I thought it would save time on the CNC machine by offsetting the vector shape and then cutting out what I need at the bandsaw and well it probably would have saved time if I had a blade in the bandsaw that allowed for tight radius cutting I simply did not I have kept this resawing blade in the bandsaw since day one and it's not set up for tight curves at all so lots of extra bandsaw work that would have been eliminated by simply using a rectangle on the computer rather than offsetting the vector I wanted to cut so lesson learned number three now the first inlay material can be glued in and for some of the inlay it's a true V carve and that means that the the V inlay will bottom out in av pocket a nice tight fit every place that the quarter inch end mill touched that's where there's a flat bottom and a little bit of space for glue extra space for glue this ended up being a problem and another lesson learned that once again I'll get into in just a second lots of clamps and calls to get even clamping pressure and I didn't have enough long range clamps to glue all the board's at once so I only glued the inlays and the maple boards first and let them sit overnight on day five over the project I started by cutting off the bulk of the inlay waste at the bandsaw and while this this worked quite well it was a little more nerve-wracking than it would have liked due to the amount of blade being exposed while passing something tall and proportionately thin through the saw but as always if you take your time and are mindful to avoid the possible dangers then it should work out alright next up is to start the cutting process on the maple inlay panel and this shows how much the panel bowed after cutting I was a little shocked about this as soon as I removed the clamps on the front side the panel just bowed up real bad oh I was worried that this amount of movement would cause issues when fitting the pieces but it ended up not being an issue at all it was just interesting to see during idle time of the CNC machine just running I started the cleanup process on the maple boards by running them soon the drum sander and when the time came to run the bubinga boards on the CNC I did a little bit of sequence testing with the two cutting bits the first test was to run the v-bit profile or the v-bit toolpath first and then the end middle second and the bottom of the cut here is it's clean and it's acceptable for this particular inlay but there it's not perfect there's just a little bit of fuzzies fuzzies and I think this is because it's an end grain cut now the second result that the second example here is a result of cutting the end mill first and the V bit second and as you can see the the results are nowhere near as clean where the two bits intersect now it's the exact same tool past the exact same bits I noticed that this fuzzy intersection only happens when cutting the end grain and not a long grain so my thinking is that the grain in this orientation is like a bunch of straws standing on end it's easy to cut through the straws the higher you go because or the grain the higher you go because the bit is moving faster because it is away from the centre of the bit because the V bit comes to a point the rotation speed and surface area covered at that point is much less per the same revolution and therefore not as if as effective at cutting so if you stand a stack of straws together and swing with a sharp blade there shouldn't be any issue cutting them should just cut right through them but if you try to cut the same stack of straws right at the base where they're fixed permanently to something else and you go much slower then you're more likely to bend and push the straws over than you are to cut them clean if that makes sense that's what I think is happening here the end grain fibers are just being bent over because the empty space where the end mill cut first isn't offering any resistance but if the V bit cuts first there's no room for the pieces to bend over they just they just cut as best they can and and the bottom of the cut it just it doesn't always cut perfectly because there's just not much speed there and after all the major CNC work is done the final inlays can be glued in place and once again I let these sit overnight just to do all the final clean-up on all of the boards at the same time the next day day six was a little bit disappointing I have to say it was the day that I realized my inlay technique mistake after getting all of the board's flush with the drum sander I noticed a very hollow sound coming from the large inlay surfaces and I knew immediately what the problem was when tapping on the area where the flat bottom was cut in the inlay process that's where the hollow sound was evident this means that there's too much of a hollow area or too much of a gap for glue under the inlay and therefore the board's can no longer be used as cutting boards which kind of sucked I wanted to give these away as cutting board gifts but instead these inlays instantly became over engineered wall art is what I'll call them at this point I was just frustrated with myself I was following a PDF inlay guide that I found online and previously tested with good results here's a picture of my test board that I cut a few week or so prior to cutting these so I followed the exact same guide with the exact same tool path settings so why in the world did I get such a drastic difference on this project and then it all made sense the specification for a flat depth on the inlay that's where the problem lies on my first attempt at this piece I forgot to flip the inlay vector so it didn't even work at all you know my second attempt I had to reduce the overall size of the vector due to the scrap wood that I was trying it on being smaller and by in doing so I completely eliminated the end of mill altogether so the second attempt was entirely a true V carve let's talk about how a V carve works really quick in comparison to an end mill cut so when cutting out a design or an inlay pocket with an end mill the walls of the cut are vertical and the bottom of the cut is flat at a spa if I'd depth now when cutting out a true inlay pocket with a V bit there is no flat on the bottom of the pocket and the depth the V bit will plunge is determined by the width that the cut needs to be sometimes this can be a problem as you will have to go deeper than the thickness of the material to get to the full width of the cut in those situations if flat depth can be specified and the inlay pocket will be broken up into two tool paths one pocket toolpath with an end mil to more efficiently remove the bulk of the waste and establish a flat bottom and one v carve tool path to establish the exact shape of the inlay or design being able to just identify the problem wasn't really good enough though I wanted to see the exact gap that I had and the exact inlay thickness that I had over the larger areas so I went back to the computer modeled a simple rectangle inlay with the exact tool path settings I used cut out the contrasting scrap blocks for the in leg glued them together and wait until the next day and cut it in half and this is the result I also included a pencil in the photo for scale but what you're looking at is a a point one inch gap below the inlay for excess glue a point one inch layer of actual inlay material when it's all said and done and a point one inch amount of waste material on top for a clamping surface so for decorative inlays where you're just looking at a design the guide I followed is a foolproof instruction to get great results for an inlay that demands actual structural strength such as a cutting board like I was trying to make the gap at the bottom for excess glue is just too large and this was confirmed by talking with a few people on instagram who make inlay and grain cutting boards successfully and actually do not allow for any extra glue any extra pocket area below the inlay that information combined with the fact that every shallow v carve cut on these inlays is a 100% fit and there are no problems with the alignment due to not Lu not having a place for the glue to go tells me that lesson learned number four is to not add any additional space for glue when making a V carve inlay on the CNC machine by day seven of this project my productivity and interest level tanked I just didn't really care about this anymore I was working on this on and off with other things going on in the shop I just wasn't interested in the project anymore so I decided to not add the contrasting trim to the border of the bubinga boards and instead just get done with the project so from this point on the goal is to just finish the pieces as wall art first up is to square all the boards at the table saw with my crosscut sled followed by sanding up to 180 grit the drum sander is great for leveling surfaces and doing the rough sanding and saving a lot of time but some other type of sanding is still necessary to remove the scratch lines that the drum sander puts into the workpiece and for that I want to mention a couple of convenient grippy items that Rockler has for preventing material from moving while on the work bench so not only are these blue silicone mats and great for keeping glue off your work surface they are also great for holding the workpiece while sanding and an even better item for holding the workpiece via gravity and friction are these bench cookies my experience is that I've been using these way more than I thought I would and they're just incredibly convenient for a lot of different work holding tasks now because these are not cutting boards anymore my planned finish of mineral oil and beeswax was replaced with shellac now I knew these endgrain boards were going to be really thirsty so first up is a few flood coats on the visible surfaces which brings me to lesson learned and number five always remember that wood movement due to moisture is faster and more noticeable on thinner wood than with thicker wood this is something that I already knew but was unpleasantly reminded of after a couple hours of letting the flood coats of shellac cure you can see here how the thinner center section of the inlay swelled up making the glue seam areas stick out like a sore thumb so this just means it had to be sanded back to an acceptable amount until I just eventually stopped and fear of cutting through the inlay it's not perfect if you really look close but oh well it is what it is these are going to hang from the wall and the easiest way to accomplish this is with a keyhole slot cut in the back and because these need to be clamped to the machine surface with the good side facing down I figured it'd be a good idea to get this step done before completing the finishing stages it probably should have been cut before I applied any finish at all but I forgot about it so just a quick back and forth with a keyhole bit on the CNC machine is it's all that's necessary it makes quick work of this little process and finally the rest of the shellac can be sanded with 320 grit sandpaper to level the flood coats so here if the shellac is bowling up on the sandpaper then that means the shellac needs more time to cure if the shellac is just producing a fine dust or a powder and the sandpaper remains clear then you're good to go after removing all the dust off the surface a handful of thinner coats of shellac can be applied with a balled up rag these thin coats they dry incredibly fast so by the time I rotate it through all the boards the first one was already perfectly dry and ready for another coat and I think I just went through all of these and added about five more coats this way after letting the boards sit overnight once again I began day 8 with the final finishing steps multiple layers of shellac they always produce a finish that's a bit too shiny for my liking it's it's kind of a gloss finish so I evenly scuffed up the surface of each board with fine steel wool to get rid of the high-gloss shine and then apply it a layer of paste wax and then quickly wiped off as much as I could for an even semi-gloss finish if you apply the paste wax and let it you know harden and then buff it out you're just gonna get a really shiny surface once again so put it on wipe it off and here's the final result after lots of fun in the shop lots of frustration in the shop and lots of lessons learned ultimately the lessons learned are the most important and rewarding takeaways from this project every time I talk about mistakes there's there's a lot people who say that I'm just being too hard on myself and I well I understand their perspective to a certain degree I have to disagree I don't beat myself up mentally it's all about acknowledging the areas for improvement and using that information to get better to do a better job next time so I LUN this with the two perspectives that I personally have on this build one side of me is kind of you know relating to the guy who who batted his personal best had a couple RBIs and a home run and that's the part of me that thinks that the end result of these a the end result is great these are nice wall decorations the other side of me that's the same exact guy who missed the ground ball and let the winning run come through in the bottom of the ninth hand lost the game for his team that's that's the part of me that was wanting to give these away as some really nice cutting boards which isn't gonna happen I don't think either one of those perspectives is wrong just lessons learned and now I'm more informed for the next time thank you to rockler Woodworking and Hardware for supporting this video for more information on this build check out the links in the video description if you are watching this on youtube you guys take care have a great day and I'll talk to you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Jay Bates

Views: 173,505

Keywords: jayscustomcreations, jay bates, easy woodworking project, woodworking, woodshop, woodworking projects, make, build

Id: 9fuJsn2gUOk

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2019