inlay outlining question

axisus

I'd like to do a Paua inlay on the body of fairly light coloured wood - My usual recurring theme of a chinese symbol. My preference would be to have it 'outlined' in black. 

Anyone know how I could go about this? my gut instinct would be to oversize the cutout in the body, put some black clay of some sort in, press in the paua cutout, leave to harden, sand and varnish.

Anyone know of a better way? I will probably do a test of this to see if it would work.

WezV

Black tinted epoxy, but it does depend on wood type and you may need to seal the wood to prevent seepage.

The old way is normal glue mixed with charcoal... Epoxy works better

axisus

WezV said:

Black tinted epoxy, but it does depend on wood type and you may need to seal the wood to prevent seepage.

The old way is normal glue mixed with charcoal... Epoxy works better

Many thanks, I'll look into it ....

Andyjr1515

If you have some ebony offcut around, an alternative might be epoxy mixed with fine ebony sanding dust. Because it is black particles instead of stain or dye, it doesn't suffer from seepage.  

Whenever I use ebony, I collect some of the dust for that very purpose.

The surround for these inlays (hand routed so not terribly accurate) and the fill of the sawcuts are done that way.  This close, you can see the bits I missed, but I don't think you can easily see that there's quite a bit of fill there:

WezV

yeah, it does work well  -  but be aware that is ebony in ebony  - a black filler  in a black background - you will need finer dust at a greater concentration to get a deep black fill in a lighter wood with a nice sharp outline- and you still need  to be aware  of any wood grain or pores that may fill with the dust