Shout out to Paul Zank and Damien Durrant!!

[laflippin]

I bought a NWA Piranha FX (comes with VCarve Desktop) about three weeks ago, without any previous experience in CNC routing. After reproducing a couple of simple "learner" projects described in the CNC Router Essentials book I purchased with the machine, I then wanted to try the type of project that I bought the Piranha to do. First, I studied some YouTube clips by Dave Van Antwerp and Shawn Gano, then I found Zank and Durrant's "Procedure for Designing and Machining V-Inlay Projects".


The videos are very good, but Zank and Durrant's 13-page pamphlet is clear, concise and even an absolute newbie like me can follow their how-to guide....see the attached pictures

[Mobius]

Congrats and well done on your first V-inlay.

[FixitMike]

Some comments on the instructions:
1. If you apply a coat or two of sealer or finish to the pocket material before cutting, it will make it easier to remove glue squeeze out.

2. The initial typical values specified for depths result in a gap of .2" under the inlay. (Inlay Pocket Flat Depth minus Inlay Start Depth). I would recommend a smaller gap of .04" which can be achieved by changing the Inlay Pocket flat depth to .14". I believe the 0.3" is a typo and was meant to be 0.2".

From the Pamphlet.

[laflippin]

Thanks for the tip about the sealant coat before glue-up, that is excellent advice.

As for the typo in the Zank and Durrant pamphlet, you are absolutely right about that...everything looked spot on to me except for that value, so I ended up using a flat depth of 0.15 for the female piece(cribbed from Shawn Gano's excellent YouTube video on making inlayed coasters). In my shout-out note, I forgot to mention that. A 0.2" channel underneath the inlay would be strange a best and probably not very sound, structurally speaking.

[martin54]

If you read the whole thread or some of the other posts on v inlay you will see that some people have made modifications to the settings, some say they get better results with a different angled bit others by altering the gap settings.
The original PDF has never been updated as far as I know but is still a very good tutorial & starting point as you have found out