I’m currently in the middle of a fun build project. My friend in the band analecta asked if I could make them a matching guitar and bass. One of the many interesting parts of these builds is that they are getting the band logo inlayed on the bodies.
This isn’t necessarily something I plan on doing often, but I made an exception for this.
How I route custom inlays
First, I needed a high quality version of the logo. My customer happens to be a graphic designer who designed this logo, so no problem there. I got the vector file and figured out the exact dimensions it should be and printed several copies at full size.
I couldn’t jump straight into routing it, I had to run some tests.
This particular logo has two circles that have stops near the top and bottom, and a big “A” overlapping the circles. In a way, this is an “easy” logo, because there aren’t any super complicated shapes going on.
Still, it took a lot of precision to route and have it come out nice and crisp looking.
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Making a circle jig
After contemplating on how to make perfect circles without messing up anything within the circles, I remembered the jig I made to make my fretboard radiusing jig.
It involves setting a pin at a distance from the router bit and screwing down the router, or in this case the Dremel, to the same piece of wood that the pin goes through.
I made a very small version to attach to the Dremel router base, tried it out and it worked great!
Routing straight lines with a Dremel
For all of the straight lines, I had to measure the distance from the router bit to the edge of the base and make marks to set a straight edge against. Then I very carefully ran the Dremel base against the straight edge, watching closely to make sure that I wasn’t going beyond any lines.
How to get sharp corners on a route
I used chisels to clean up all of the corners and points in the route so that it didn’t have rounded corners everywhere.
I also carefully scraped all of the edges with the chisels to clean off any maple fuzz so that the edges were nice and crisp.
On to the real inlays
Since my (four) test routes worked out, I moved on to the real thing.
Most of the process is shown in the video at the bottom of this post. What I cut out from the video is doing each route multiple times, very slowly increasing the depth of the route.
In inlays I’ve done in the past, I have found this step to be incredibly important. If you try to take off too much at a time, the Dremel bit will pull and you will end up going outside of where you’re trying to route.
So, even though the routes are not very deep, you still really need to creep up on the depth, taking just a little at a time.
The inlay material
For these inlays, I decided to use casting resin and mica powder for the inlay material.
Mica powders come in so many amazing colors, so I was excited to try this out.
It took quite a bit of mixing to get to the right shade of lavender that we wanted for these inlays, but the color turned out great (even though it’s incredibly hard to get it to show up correctly on camera).
Watch the whole inlay process
And finally, check out the video I shot while working on these custom inlays.
