Hey everyone,
I'm a junior in high school and I really enjoy woodworking. Currently I am taking Materials Processing and Machine Programming 2, which is essentially a woodshop class. For our first project we had to build a jewelry box.
Most kids made theirs out of poplar and then stained them. I decided to make mine out of mahogany. I'm more of a walnut guy, but I had never worked with mahogany before so I thought I would give it a try.
I decided to do some walnut and maple stripe inlays, which were very easy and I was able to get them to fit very tightly with no gaps.
I then decided to put a purpleheart heart inlay on the front of the box. My school has a laser CNC so I cut both the vector outline for the heart in the box and the inlay itself using the laser. The fit is almost perfect, but the laser wouldn't allow me to account for the kerf of the laser, which is very small but does leave a gap.
On the top of the box I am going to inlay my girlfriend's name in walnut. Once again the laser left a gap so the inlay isn't perfect.
Questions: Regarding the inlays:
- 1) What should I use to glue the inlays in? Some websites recommend cyanoacrylate, and others epoxy, but would Titebond II work?
- 2) What do I use to fill the gaps? I have seen that many people recommend fine saw dust and cyanoacrylate.
- 3) If I fill the gaps using cyanoacrylate, do I need to preseal the wood?