glue lines showing on inlay

[happyturner]

I'm doing an inlay in an end grain board using VCarve. The female was .4 depth. I mirrored the vectors then put a box around them to do the Vcarve. The male had a start depth of .24 and a flat depth of .15. Most of the inlay turned out great but there were 5 or 6 spots were the glue lines between the two contrasting woods are very prominent. I was using a Amana 60 degree V groove insert to cut the v carve with a .25 end mill to do the bulk of the clearing of wood.
I did this once before and it came out great. I used a regular plain jane 60 degree vbit. I think the only thing that I have done different this time was use the amana bit. Could that be the problem? Because maybe its not really 60 degrees?
when I glued them together I smashed them between 2 plates of 3/8 thick metal with lots of clamps.
I would post pictures but it said the file was too big.
Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.
thanks!

[Rcnewcomb]

Most photos taken with a phone are too large to upload to the forum. They need to be resized. If you have Windows 10 it has a image resizer. You can also use your favorite internet search engine to look for free online image resizer. These will allow you to shrink the files to something suitable for uploading to the forum (i.e. 640x480 pixels).

Alternately you can upload the files/photos to drive.google.com or dropbox.com and then share the link to the file(s) here.

[happyturner]

thank you Randall for telling me how to up load images!
These are some of the glue lines I was talking about.
again thank you for any suggestions or comments

[scottp55]

Were the Males cut in strips, or all out of one solid board?
Was everything glued in one shot?

Reminds me of one of my earliest VInlays, where I decided to use the left cast table extension of my Unisaw to weight a 24" Vinlay down and distribute the clamp pressure.
Workpiece was on a low table, and in the wheelchair as I leaned forward to settle the cast iron...I must have hit the Male on the top first, and it seated first(AND I didn't check seating ).

I dissected that one to see exactly what happened...and tops of letters were a TIGHT fit with no glue gap, and lower section was barely seated
That's an extreme example, but might your seating of the Male before clamping been "Nudged" somehow, and gone off level?

Cut .033" deeper...made another Male that I cut into smaller pieces, and watched my clamping that time and saved it:)
scott

[happyturner]

Were the Males cut in strips, or all out of one solid board?
Was everything glued in one shot?

Reminds me of one of my earliest VInlays, where I decided to use the left cast table extension of my Unisaw to weight a 24" Vinlay down and distribute the clamp pressure.
Workpiece was on a low table, and in the wheelchair as I leaned forward to settle the cast iron...I must have hit the Male on the top first, and it seated first(AND I didn't check seating ).

inlay problem Maine messed up clamping.jpg

inlay that clamping muck up.jpg

I dissected that one to see exactly what happened...and tops of letters were a TIGHT fit with no glue gap, and lower section was barely seated
That's an extreme example, but might your seating of the Male before clamping been "Nudged" somehow, and gone off level?

Cut .033" deeper...made another Male that I cut into smaller pieces, and watched my clamping that time and saved it:)
scott

Males were cut in one solid board. Then the male was glued as one piece to female.
should i cut the male on 1 solid board, then cut it into strips and glue individually? Or break it up even more and cut each line of text up individually, then glue?
do you think my depths are too great? I know it doesnt bottom out because i cut it up and there was still a gap at the bottom of the female.
when i clamped it, I sandwiched it between two 3/8 plates of steel and used 8 large 6 inch "F" clamps plus 6 smaller "F" clamps.
someone suggested, on another site, end grain tear out, but i remember looking the male over and not seeing any tear out.
any ideas or suggestions welcome

[rscrawford]

I always glue in each letter separately, but I cut my inlays using a different method than the one on this forum.

If you glue larger inlays like this in one piece, your machine has to be PERFECTLY set up. The gantry has to be PERFECTLY square to the Y-axis, the spindle has to be PERFECTLY trammed, etc. Since you are mirroring the image and cutting it, any little error will be doubled and will show up as a bad fit when the inlay is flipped over and glued in place.

To illustrate this, take a parallelogram and mirror it and then try to fit the mirrored image over the original image. They won't be close. If your gantry is out of square by just a little, you are getting this same scenario.

You can check the squareness by cutting a large rectangle (I use a v-bit and cut on the line just enough to scratch your spoilboard so you can see it). Measure the diagonals. If they aren't exactly the same, then you need to adjust the squareness of your gantry. This is the most common reason these larger inlays don't fit properly. Smaller inlays have enough give in the wood to be able to force the fibres for a tight fit, which is why separating the letters will often give you a good fit when gluing in the whole things as one unit does not give a good fit.

[happyturner]

I always glue in each letter separately, but I cut my inlays using a different method than the one on this forum.

If you glue larger inlays like this in one piece, your machine has to be PERFECTLY set up. The gantry has to be PERFECTLY square to the Y-axis, the spindle has to be PERFECTLY trammed, etc. Since you are mirroring the image and cutting it, any little error will be doubled and will show up as a bad fit when the inlay is flipped over and glued in place.

To illustrate this, take a parallelogram and mirror it and then try to fit the mirrored image over the original image. They won't be close. If your gantry is out of square by just a little, you are getting this same scenario.

You can check the squareness by cutting a large rectangle (I use a v-bit and cut on the line just enough to scratch your spoilboard so you can see it). Measure the diagonals. If they aren't exactly the same, then you need to adjust the squareness of your gantry. This is the most common reason these larger inlays don't fit properly. Smaller inlays have enough give in the wood to be able to force the fibres for a tight fit, which is why separating the letters will often give you a good fit when gluing in the whole things as one unit does not give a good fit.

Thank you Russell. I will do it again and cut it up as much as i can and re-glue.

i'm curious, what is your method of cutting an inlay?

[scottp55]

The second time I did that 2.5X20" "Made in Maine" font, I actually separated the letters in the file for a space for smaller pieces to be scroll sawed off.

I never used the cast extension again, but started clamping based on the pieces and with smaller wood pieces to distribute pressure was quite happy.
Unless spoilboard was perfectly flat And material had been surfaced FLAT on the waste side, I'm thinking you could easily be getting some spots with uneven clamping pressure using the steel on the entire project?

Are you inspecting the Female AND the Male before clamping to see if any possible hang ups?
Is the dry fit showing a uniform clearance space?

Maybe the easiest is to try with the bit you used before on some scrap? I've used a 60* engraving bit with a .01" flat on all mine in the past with good clean cuts with very little cleanup after the second pass on the toolpath(elimination of cutting forces pretty much, and NO fuzzies) and was quite happy with the fit.
Going to try a 30* engraving with .005and .01" flat next for fine details.

Are you gluing up the same day so Male isn't exposed too long to differences in humidity/temp/stress relief?

Hope others chime in, as all my VInlays were done years ago as booth and customer displays years ago....looking forward to getting back into it:)
scott

[rscrawford]

[quote="happyturner
Thank you Russell. I will do it again and cut it up as much as i can and re-glue.

i'm curious, what is your method of cutting an inlay?[/quote]

I cut the female inlay simply using a v-carve with a flat depth of 0.15".

The male inlay I mirror, then arrange each piece to fit closely together with the grain running how I want for each individual inlay. Then I do a prism cut on the vector, 0.12" deep. I then offset each vector 0.08" and do a v-carve between the original and offset vectors, with a start depth of 0.12" (so it starts at the depth of the prism cut). This just extends the male inlay a bit so it has room to be clamped and still sit proud of the female cut when glued in place.

I then resaw the male inlay and run it through a thickness sander until the pieces are held in place with just a thin, transparent onionskin. At this point I pop out each male inlay individually and glue it in place. I usually start out with an 8/4 piece of stock, and can resaw and use that block again and again for inlays until its too thin (I use less then 1/4" of the block each time).

[Rcnewcomb]

I usually start out with an 8/4 piece of stock, and can resaw and use that block again and again for inlays until its too thin

The prism carve and reusing the stock are very clever.