Inlay challenge: design

[Jamie Buxton]

A friend asked me to dress up a bay window in his home. It was trimmed with plain oak ply and pine trim, and needed help. We talked about several ideas, and eventually I mentioned the geometric designs used on walls and floors in Muslim buildings. He pulled out a small plate he’d bought in Toledo, Spain. Made with a technique called damascinado (literally, “in the style of Damascus”), it carried a design derived from Spain’s Moorish era, when Arabs ruled Spain. The plate is pictured below. My task became to make a wood design based on the plate.



The plate has only two colors, but has engraver’s curliques and flourishes. As I translated the design to wood, I dropped the curliques, but made use of the many colors and textures of wood. The end result is pictured below. The pattern is about 22” in diameter. The background wood is jatoba. The arcs are bloodwood and walnut. From the outside in, the infills are: maple burl, fiddleback maple, black palm, and ebony.

[Jamie Buxton]

There are many ways of doing inlay work, but the one I chose for this design is router-jig intensive. Basically, I cut cavities in the background wood, and carefully fit other pieces of wood into the cavities.
To build the design, I started by bandsawing veneers roughly .09” thick. I edge-jointed the jatoba veneers, veneer-taped them into a sheet, and glued them to the plywood substrate in a vacuum press. I made this assembly somewhat larger than the finished size.
Then I made the first fixture pictured below. Its purpose is to cut the arcs in the inlay. It is a large ring, with 12 holes bored carefully around a ring. The holes are pivot points for the router-on-a-stick which is also in the picture. Impailed on a pivot point, the router swings an arc across the the jatoba-covered plywood. The fixture also has positioning pins which go into holes bored at the edges of the plywood. These pins allowed me to remove the fixture, and mount it back on the plywood in exactly the same position.
I cut each arc with two passes of the router: one for the inside edge, and the other for the outside edge. To do this, the router-on-a-stick has two pivot holes. In the pic, you see the result after I’ve completely cut the arcs the first time.
After I cut the arcs, I removed the arc-cutting fixture. Then I used a hand-held router to hog out the jatoba in the areas which were going to become the infills. I made the infill pieces somewhat larger than they’d be in the finished piece, and glued them in. Then I re-mounted the arc-cutting fixture, and re-cut the arcs. This re-cut step trimmed all the edges of the infills.

Then I made the second fixture pictured below. Its purpose is to make the curved pieces which fill the arcs. It, too, involves two passes of a router-on-a-stick. Again, one pass makes the inside edge, and the other pass makes the outside edge. The workpiece (a little sheet of bloodwood veneer in this pic) is held by double-sided carpet tape. I made twelve walnut pieces and twelve bloodwood pieces.

I used a hand-held router to hog out the waste in the middle of each arc, and then glued in the walnut and bloodwood curved pieces. The arcs look basket-weaved as they cross each other, so there was yet another fixture cutting the ends of each segment of walnut and bloodwood.

[Brett Baldwin]

That fiddleback maple gives the piece a real radiating sun look. Very cool effect. The whole thing a superior piece. Nice job Jamie.

[Neil Lamens]

Hey Jamie:

Nice jig and fixture work.

What is the wood that fills in the walnut/bloodwood arcs towards the outside???? And am I correct in seeing what I percieve to be end grain, towards the center?????

By the way.........I love your bench......looks worked!!!!

Neil

[Jim Becker]

Looks like a job for the woodworker's equivalent of the ol' SpiroGraph! (Remember them??? )

Nice work, Jamie! Those designs are timeless, IMHO.

[Jamie Buxton]

Hey Jamie:

Nice jig and fixture work.

What is the wood that fills in the walnut/bloodwood arcs towards the outside???? And am I correct in seeing what I percieve to be end grain, towards the center?????

By the way.........I love your bench......looks worked!!!!

Neil

From the outside going in, the infills are: maple burl, fiddleback maple, black palm, and ebony. It is probably the palm you're seeing as end grain. It has a very strong stripey pattern.

The bench is nearly thirty years old, and has seen lots of use.

[Paul Johnstone]

Thanks for sharing that. I hope to do my first inlay project in a couple months (when I get caught up).

[Dennis Perry]

Hey Jamie, very nice work your website shows great work also.

Thanks Dennis

[Mike Henderson]

Very nice work. It makes a stunning focal point in the piece.

I went to your site and looked at your work. I have a question about the drop down table that you integrated into your Murphy bed. How does the sliding part of the table work? It has to come up but then lock into place.

Also, what is the locking mechanism to hold everything closed? It looks like there's a swivel mechanism on the table support that locks everything in place. Are there two rods that move in and out in response to the swivel to lock the top and bottom of the leg? If so, how is the table itself held in place when closed?

Thanks. Your work is outstanding.

Mike

[Howard Rosenberg]

Hi Jamie -

You've got great taste (and skill) (and imagination).

If you ever wanna go through an EVEN MORE full-blown tutorial (construction and use of the trammel, for example) I know I'd be ALL EARS.

Many thanks.

Howard

[glenn bradley]

Looks VERY nice. The figure appearing to radiate out form the center is very compelling.

[Doug Shepard]

Fantastic job and thanks for posting the pics of those slick jigs. I cant tell from looking at the first pic though - how were you starting/stopping the trammel swing in the exact locations going around the circle? Were there pins in the adjacent pivot holes that were butting up againast the trammel arm? Or stopping by eye at pencil layout lines? Just curious.

[Fred Voorhees]

Jamie, that jig is brilliant! This particular post is a great example of why I come to the creek often. There is just no end to what a woodworker can pick up. I've come up with some jigs in the past to conquer some problems, but that one there for your router is a beaut!

[Jamie Buxton]

Fantastic job and thanks for posting the pics of those slick jigs. I cant tell from looking at the first pic though - how were you starting/stopping the trammel swing in the exact locations going around the circle? Were there pins in the adjacent pivot holes that were butting up againast the trammel arm? Or stopping by eye at pencil layout lines? Just curious.

Doug, I had layout lines, but it turned out they weren't really useful. The arcs meet at such a flat angle that if the pivot locations are off by just a hair, the meeting point of two arcs moves a lot. Eventually I just eyeballed it very carefully -- that is, swinging the router until I could see the bit lining up with the arc it was meeting. Sometimes I had to do two or three attempts to sneak up on getting two arcs to meet.

[Jamie Buxton]

I went to your site and looked at your work. I have a question about the drop down table that you integrated into your Murphy bed. How does the sliding part of the table work? It has to come up but then lock into place.

Also, what is the locking mechanism to hold everything closed? It looks like there's a swivel mechanism on the table support that locks everything in place. Are there two rods that move in and out in response to the swivel to lock the top and bottom of the leg? If so, how is the table itself held in place when closed?

Thanks for your compliments. That bed is full of engineering, some of which is not obvious from the pix.


Let me answer the questions in your second paragraph first. In the photo at the lower left there is a round device in the middle of the bed. It is inside a rectangle which is the support for the outboard end of the table. The rectangle outside that is the outline of the table itself. The round device is a twistable handle. It is a circle of wood with the middle scooped out, and a wood bar running across it. You can get your fingers behind the bar to grab it, and to turn the whole round device. The round device connects to two rods which connect to pins which move horizontally. In their outward position, the pins protrude out the edges of the table support into the table. There, they drive two more pins horizontally into the bed platform itself. That is, twisting the round device locks the table support into the table, and the table into the bed platform. Do I have you confused yet?

The pins are jarrah, so when the table is open they don't look obviously different from the table edge.


In the lower right pic, you might be able to see another one of those round devices in the table top, at the inboard end. It is jarrah, like the rest of the top, so it is nearly invisible in that photo. Like the other round device, it is a twistable handle. In this case, it gets used to pick up the inboard end of the table, and then gets twisted to push pins out into the bed platform. The pins actually ride in a concealed channel in the bed platform. When they're retracted, they retain the end of the table while it is getting lifted up and down. When they're pushed out by the twistable handle, they hold up the table.

Jamie