Making Abalone Inlay Blanks - Luthiery Tips - Klesh Guitars - Mother of Pearl - Ebony

hey everyone welcome back to another video so today I'm here in the shop and I'm making some inlay so if any there's any luthiers watching you know the price of Abalone and mother of pearl and stuff like that and how much it costs if you want to purchase blanks it's like eighty dollars for an ounce that's ridiculous um so what I'm doing is I decided to make my own out of Abalone shells right so this is you know I purchased this at the the Denver Gem and Mineral show they're a dollar each so um instead of paying eighty dollars for something all we have to do is a little bit of work a little bit of Ingenuity some tools and uh I'll show you how we do it all right the first thing is I'm gonna you can see that this shell here there's a lot of Curves and stuff in it we can't really use that unless we're going to use really narrow purpling and stuff um which you can absolutely do that's what this piece right here is it's just the curved part that I cut off and there's still some flat area there it's probably a half an inch at the widest down to a quarter inch which is useful but it has that curve in it too which makes it really difficult you know we have to cut it smaller smaller half inch one inch pieces so basically what I'm doing is I'm taking the uh this is just reinforced cut off bit cut off disc from Dremel it's got the reinforcement stuff on there you can also use the regular cutoff disc but these break a lot and then the little diamond wheel which I didn't even get to I'm trying to go through all of these I just got sick of changing it so I I went right to the reinforced one um but I figured this one here is probably the best right the diamond um so any of those three would work I wouldn't recommend doing it on the bandsaw because if you did um it could catch and blow blow the entire thing up I'll cut off everything from here I'll Trace I'll get rid of these because right here where these little holes are there's like a waviness that has to be ground down anyway so from here I just cut basically this entire curve off following the pencil line that and then this part here where all these deep curves and stuff are in this area I'll I'll just cut this area out and then I'll be left with this inner part all right and I'll cut that into smaller like one inch squares or three you know 7 8 inch squares got my mask on and um you can just observe what I do I won't be able to explain as I go so just watch How I do it [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so here here's our waist I mean you could still like I said before you can still use it for purflame or any application that's going to use some curved stuff or really tiny pieces you can certainly cut this up and make it into really small pieces but the curve makes it kind of unusable for flat surfaces and that's what I need these for for my logos so these two small pieces this was a small shell the bigger shells have are thicker and you get away with more grinding these thinner shells you don't get as much but for a dollar a piece I mean that's 80 bucks worth of inlay Abalone right there so that after that um and by the way wear masks wear glasses and you'll figure that out on your own soon enough but this stuff you'll you will get silicosis from it it'll it'll solidify in your lungs and it's it ain't good so definitely wear PPE uh these are the sizes that we're going to be working with here they're just rough now but they're already looking familiar you can see it's not perfectly straight so in order to make them straight what we have to do is sand one side flat and we're going to run it through the thickness sander and I'll show you how to do that um to make the top flat so all we have to do is get one side flat by hand and uh I'll show you how to do that here um don't mind the noise I can't do it with one hand but another thing that I like to use is this is one of those sander erasers you know it cleans off your belts you can actually put that right on top of there and instead of having your fingers right on top of it what you can do as well this thing here allows you to get more even pressure all the way across and it'll flatten out the one side so let me get my tripod I'll show you how I do that all right let's try that again so this is the way I was doing it let me put on my mask here all right this is the piece we're working on another thing is this is kind of important I like to flatten the shiny part first you flatten this and then this rough side is what's going to be ran through the thickness planer and the bulk of the material will be taken off the top which is the rougher side which makes more sense right so uh so first we'll do it just by hand and then I'll show you how I do it with this this thing is actually because these also get really really hot in your fingers and you can't really wear gloves I I wouldn't recommend wearing gloves when working with power tools anyway so you have to use your bare hands but you're going to sand your fingers off a little bit and that's fine you can do it like that but when you're doing 50 of them and you can press down a lot harder and the work gets done faster with one of these things so there you go that is a flat Edge we'll set that off to the side and we'll we'll continue going this one here is pretty bent um you can tell on camera this one here is pretty wavy right there this one here um might not work we're gonna have to trim we might have to cut some of this off so instead of taking it over to the saw again we just sand it off another cool thing about this is when you're running it if you press down on the back it'll actually clean the Sandpaper as you work so you get a two for there so this one here is pretty darn flat on that side and that's all we need to do so I'll continue that process for all of these this is a thinner piece right this was from like the middle of the shell where it's real thin around the edges it's thicker so when you get to the middle of the shell it might look flatter and you would think that's the better part but when it comes down to it when you start sanding it and trying to get it level it's actually going to disintegrate almost the entire piece so this is so thin it's just you know we can't use that so that's something to consider this piece here we've got a good 16th of an inch to work with maybe 3 30 seconds so but we have also have that big dip right here and if we left that on we would have to grind the entire thing down until that was gone so we're going to remove that edge and then flatten the shiny part that's another thin part it looked at first like it was going to be a great piece but it's just super thin so all right got a handful to go and then uh we can I'll show you how to run through the thickness planer thicken the sander all right next we have to attach the good pieces to a flat piece of wood and we're going to run it through our thickness sander so far we have a few pieces that are too thin they're not gonna they're either they have like a hollow in the middle because there were two curves I didn't cut them small enough that's all that means um I probably could I probably could save that one but we're gonna have a pile of um junkers and a pile of keepers at the end just so you can kind of figure out how much waste you're going to end up having of not including the curved cut off part this pile has one flat side what we need to do is we need to stick them to this flat piece of wood run it through the thickness sander so all I'm going to do is I'm going to take a piece of blue tape and some super glue and instead of super gluing this directly to the wood which would make it very difficult and probably break it when we're coming to take it off we're just going to super glue the tape to itself it's a good work around so for double stick tape a lot of um that's that's solid right there I don't even have activate around that um that's another thing you could do you know just take a small piece of tape put it on the back of one of your things the other piece of tape right here and then you just put a drop of super glue on one side and then just spray activator I happen to have a little dropper for my activator just a little bit of activator right there and then it automatically cures it right like that that's permanent until I don't want it to be permanent anymore right so we'll just go ahead and do that for everything and uh go to the next step and honestly if we get one single good piece out of this entire process this took me less than an hour to do um it cost me not including the tools of course you know the sander and the drill and all that stuff um it costs you know 10 bucks for not even just for the shells you got to find them wholesale though like I did at the Gemma show you could probably find them online eBay stuff like that you could find mother of pearl as well and this also works for like pieces of Ebony and stuff I just made a whole batch of Ebony really thin Ebony and this is the same process that I use so I didn't do it with shell yet but it should work [Music] we already lost one piece right there it blew off somehow I'm not expecting all of them to work [Music] [Music] all right not too bad looks like we have a couple of them that split in half but they're still usable um stuff there like this one here broke we'll get in between the tape with this little thin spatula here pull that up you can see it broke but now we have a usable piece of Abalone inlay one ounce of this stuff like I said costs about 80 bucks we'll go ahead and put peel all this off and we'll weigh it up just to see how much money I mean technically we if we sold this stuff this is like a money printing machine right I did all this within an hour so let's go ahead and uh we'll we'll take these pieces off and we'll lay them out and I'll show you the quality first of all and uh yeah we'll weigh it up see what we get all right so we got like an ounce and a half almost and there you go nice and flat on one side the other side is also flat they are about a sixteenth of an inch thick or about a millimeter a little over a millimeter so here you can see a small batch of ebony that I did there's still a little bit of super glue on the one side these are a little bit thicker but we have Pearl and Ebony I'm going to take these to my laser engraver and this is what the The Clash guitars logo is going to look like on the guitars it's going to have a k with the little arms sticking out of it there the K is going to be the Pearl and the ebony disc is going to be the same except the K is going to be Purl so there you go I used to carve these by hand like this one here is that's hand carved along with every other inlay I've ever done but I'm going to be doing 10 guitars a month and carving these out takes me personally way too long so I'm going to hire somebody to do it for me on a laser to have a perfect result at a little bit of a cost to me but to me it's worth it so anyway um there you go awesome nice pieces of Abalone inlay works for Pearl works for Ebony and a little bit of waste you know I mean I could technically probably still use some of this but you can see up close how there's that dip in it and we don't want that so anyway that's all I got for today if you enjoyed the video learned something hit the thumbs up subscribe if you want and that's all I got for today thanks for watching

Channel: KleshGuitars

Views: 18,669

Keywords: making mother of pearl blanks, making abalone inlay blanks, inlay blanks, how to make inlay blanks, mother of pearl inlay blanks, abalone inlay blanks, kleshguitars inlay, klesh guitars inlay, guitar inlay, luthier tips, luthier inlay tips

Id: coV6jkF9UtA

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 11 2022