Decided to make a wooden purse / bag for the upcoming ren fest.
Step 1 was to fiddle around with living edge sizes and tabs until I had something visually appealing. I also decided to split the faceplate from the bag itself so I could make it from hardwood.
After that, I cut the pattern out on Tarkin followed by a quick sand of both sides.
Cut out the reverse inlay from some curly maple & did a full days worth of stain/finish spraying. Got a more or less dead on match to the wenge. (Didn’t take any pictures of this that I remembered to save unfortunately)
Glued everything up, attached some bits of hardware & a few bits of scrap leather to protect the interior of the living hinge, and viola:
There’s a thread titled “laser wood inlay with great results” that details the process, but in short it’s just a rastered pocket + a horizontally mirrored negative of the pocket.
The secret is using foil tape to back the inlay veneer, this stops any shifting of the smaller/free floating pieces.
The detail it can achieve is pretty amazing, this isn’t even a super fine detail in the overall scheme of it + I used some badly prepped veneer and some of the tooling marks are slightly visible.
The dark lines aren’t just engraved maple/the inlay is perfectly flat. Tarkin’s power supply is quick enough that you can realistically get detail of ~150 microns to work.
