Skill: Inlaying a butterfly

hey everybody I'm Bryan let's go do some woodwork so today we're going to talk about in laying a butterfly I call them butterflies some people call them Dutchman's bowties whatever you like to call them doesn't really matter I like to make them with a round profile on the end I think it looks nice some people put round profiles this way as well doesn't really matter it all serves the exact same purpose to hold the wood together or in this case to cover up a defect which is why I'm doing it and also for the demonstration I've gone to the bandsaw and I've cut out this shape and right now all of the edges on here are at exactly 90 degrees I set my bandsaw nice so everything on here is square and that's not what I want but I want is for the entire butterfly to be just slightly tapered and when I say tapered I'm talking about maybe a degree at the most and that's so that when I inlay it it wedges its way in and there's no gaps around it it's a very tight joint that's what I'm going to go for so I'm going to go ahead and show you how I do that and then I'll show you how I Inlet so using both my belt sander and sanding sticks I have my butterfly ready if I check it with my square I can see have an ever so slight bevel on the entire perimeter so that as I inlay it it will wedge down into the cavity that I create so I I already know what my spot is pick my spot over here and I want to trace the outline as I do it so I don't trust myself to just hold it there and trace it because if I slip or I push this piece out of orientation while I'm describing it onto the slab here I have to sort of start again and I don't like doing that so I like to use this cyanoacrylate goo that is a gel formula it works quite well I'm going to flip this over and I'm going to put just a couple of dots on here and this is going to snap back off the surface very easily so we want a little dot hold on and that's enough to hold it spot and then I can just give it a tap and it'll snap right back off of there so I'm going to choose my spot I want to cover up that little defect put it in a nice area here squish that glue out and then just keep some nice even pressure on there for a few seconds that's already immobilized that's not going anywhere just do that for a few more seconds now to transfer the piece onto the slab you can use an Olfa knife which is what I prefer I've put a fresh brand-new blade in here and that's what I'm going to use you can also use for all kinds of inlay this type and other types you can use a scalpel and those are really great that's kind of an older blade and this is really hard wood so I'm going to use the Olfa knife because I'll probably get a better line that way so I'm going to go around the perimeter and it's really important that you get this right the first time because if you don't you're going to see the cut on the surface if yet if you make a mistake so when I do this I make sure I'm not awkwardly pulling on the blade in a direction that doesn't feel right I'm in a good position I feel comfortable my score across the wood I'm doing it with virtually no pressure downward I'm just letting the knife run across the surface and I do it a few more times increasing the pressure as I go yet don't want to push down hard on this right off the bat because if you don't do it right you're really going to regret that big deep mark you just made that you can't get rid of so I'm going to go around the entire perimeter doing that just really gently at first and then once I've done a nice gentle pass that's slightly more pressure and it'll follow in the path of the line that I've just done you this is the exact same technique that you use if you're doing decorative in life and you're in laying a flower or something into the surface of a headstock on a guitar or a piece of furniture it's exactly the same technique so now I know it's all scored now I'm going to get my hammer and I can just gently tap this and this is going to come right off and it hasn't wrecked anything you can see there's a little bit of a remnant of the glue there which we can scrape off I have a nice outline on the surface of the wood that we're going to use as a guide now when you're in laying something on light-colored wood it's really easy because the dark line of the cut contrasts very strongly against the light-colored wood if you're doing this on dark colored wood it suddenly becomes very much more difficult because you can't see your dark line on the dark wood so the trick is that you do this entire process just like this and then you take chocolate rock will be nice and white and then as we wrote out the wood and the chalk sort of puffs away and disappears you know you've reached the line in this case we can see very clearly with the router when we've reached the line we need to do I'm just deepening the line just a little bit so I can see it really well getting really close into those corners and there we go now I'm going to talk a little bit about what I'm going to use to wrote it up so first of all I'm going to say that every time I wrote something out I do it in stages one-eighth of an inch at a time I do not try and wrote out the depth of that piece of wood all at once that's dangerous and you shouldn't do it should little steps if you feel more comfortable routing a sixteenth of an inch at a time then you should do what you feel comfortable doing but do not try and take out a whole bunch of it at once it's it's not safe so I'm comfortable with doing an eighth of an inch of wood at once so I have this set to the depth of an eighth of an inch and most of these types of tools are very dark on the inside there when you're doing inlay work you can't see inside the cavity so I've taken a camping headlamp and strapped it on here that allows me to light up really well inside of there and I can see the shadow cast by my cut line really well so I'm going to go through and I'm going to do this in stages I'm going to route everything out close to my line I'm not going to touch my line went 1/8 of an inch at a time and when I'm almost at full depth I'm going to wrote the whole thing out and then I'm going to sneak up to my line and you'll see that as I sneak up to the line the wood will feather and crumble away I don't when that happens I don't touch it again you're done and then we'll go in with some hand tools afterwards and clean it up so we'll start routing and you'll see the process gone over and I've sharpened up my edge tools because I have a curved edge here you could do those with a gouge but I have little chisels I do the mother so I go around and you can very clearly see around the perimeter inside of here that there is a small shelf where we cut with the knife you can see the ridges that were created by the rotor so I'm going to put my edge tool right in that area where the knife ran I'm going to go around and I'm going to pair way to would following that knife curve I'm going to go around and I'm going to do that same thing I can on my flat surface now so I can use a larger chisel here put my hat is--all on to the knife curve Oh ah you may be wondering why I've chosen to inlay this particular shape into the slab and it's sort of a traditional shape that helps hold together two pieces of wood because of its tapered shape in this case it's just covering a defect and I'm doing this for demonstration purposes I wanted to show how to do it because it's only covering a defect it could have been a very thin piece of wood an eighth of an inch thick and just covered the defect but I thought it was important to show how to make it a little deeper because when you do inlay butterflies ah or Dutchman's or whatever you call them into larger pieces of wood they shouldn't be relief them because they won't work it has to be thick enough to be strong to hold the pieces together and if it's not it won't serve its intended purpose so this is a thickness that I would generally call a quote as thin as I would go for putting some of these on a piece of slab furniture cleaned out the perimeter I've got my butterfly ready the floor inside is nice and flat and so at this point I'm ready to glue it in if I take it and I just sit it on there right now it does fit but I can't push it in because it will wedge and there's no getting it back on again so this is sort of a one-time deal you want to make sure that you have the orientation correct so I generally just put a little triangle somewhere so I remember which way it goes this piece still has those little crazy glue dots on there I'm going to go ahead take a scraper flatten that back up against I know my orientation and so now I'm ready to go so I'm going to use Titebond original wood glue just an aliphatic resin glue this is going to be just fine for what I'm doing here well spread all that around into every nook and cranny make sure that I get a little bit of glue up on to the edges around now the important thing is a little bit of glue all the way around this piece this is what's going to spread glue along the surface to cover these services it'll just make a big mess if I do this will self spread the glue as it goes tryam taking the glue out of the bottom here because you don't need puddles it's not going to serve any purpose oh I've got even amount of glue all the way around got some glue inside my cavity cross your fingers because you only get to do it once so set that in there hmm it appears to have worked quite well yeah just so I don't have a mess to clean up later on I'm going to go around you use the back edge of a chisel that's a scraper to just clean up a little bit of glue that's squeezed out cleaning this I'm looking at that edge I'm really happy with how tight that in which is why we put a bevel on it it's not enough of a bevel to split anything or break everything it's enough of a bevel to make it a nice tight fit just what is that it serves absolutely no purpose for them tight so now you can use whatever method you prefer for the woods you were using to flush these surfaces off whether it's a hand plane or belt sander disc sander whatever it is you're using and I'm going to go ahead and do that you you

Channel: Learning Woodworking

Views: 107,786

Rating: 4.9290409 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, inlay, butterfly, chisel, router

Id: gNgV0whrGXo

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 12 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/tallyrand]

tasty fretwork

[u/123D133412D]

His YouTube only has 12 videos :(

[u/[deleted]]

That's the first time I've seen an inlay done that well.

[u/JulioElGuapo]

Skill: Inhaling a butterfly

wtf subreddit is this? artisanvideos! wtf? I guess that would require some serious talent...

reread title.. oh I'm retarded