Wood: "ricewood", Honduras mahogany
Finish: Danish oil, paint
This box was a first experiment with inlaying a shape into the top surface. The learning curve was pretty steep and I have a long way to go if I wish to pursue this.
The box body is made from an unknown tropical hardwood that was given to me by a man named Bob Rice. He brought it back from Central or South America, and he didn't know what it was either. It started out as a large slab about four feet long and perhaps 8 x 10 inches. I had it sliced down to roughly 7/8 inch thickness and have mostly used it for things like picture frames, but I wanted to get one box from it.
I had a rough idea of what I wanted the inlay shape to be, so I basically searched the web until I found something that worked, scaled it to the right size, and then ran it off to the laser printer. I then glued it on to a piece of wood that would provide some contrast to the mahogany top in its "pre-paint" form. The next step was to cut away all the wood until it lined up with the black part of the pattern - in other words, get rid of what isn't "note." This was time consuming and I was trying very hard to not mess it up. It turned out to be the easy part.
The next stage was tracing around the shape onto the mahogany, and then excavating the surface to exactly match the shape at the correct depth. I mostly did this with very small and sharp chisels. This turned out to be extremely frustrating. I was pretty concerned about going too wide or too deep. I eventually got so frustrated that I put it all aside and didn't look at it for about three years.
When I returned to the project, I continued with the excavation. I did not worry so much about depth as in creating too much gap around the shape - which was exactly what happened. I tried some new filler material, which got rid of the gaps. Unfortunately, it is purely synthetic and did not take finish the same way as the surrounding wood. It is really designed for use in a project that has already been finished. So the only way to address that problem was to paint over the inlay panel but not the inlay. I let my wife choose the color, since it was going to be her box.
The unpainted portion of the box was just finished with two or three coats of Danish oil, and there is a felt liner for the bottom. It also has some small feet made from the leftover felt, since all the pre-made feet I had in the shop were just too big.
The lessons learned here are (1) I need a lot more practice if I ever want to get good at this inlay stuff, and (2) watch out for the unintended consequences of using new materials.
