When you experienced the chip out, did you consider cutting a groove around each inlay and just fill with epoxy? Epoxy is your super power, so you once you figure out how to hold the bowl in the right position so the epoxy doesnt run out, you may have a cool looking saved project. Love your channel!
Not to plug another channel but I wonder if you’ve ever seen any of Broinwood’s inlay work? I’d really like to learn how to reproduce some deep inlay work using 11 or 15 degree v-bits in fusion, it seems like anyone doing v-bit inlays is exclusively using vcarve or some other vectric product. I enjoyed the video, I’ve been where you were on this project many times, and the projects that I end up frustrated with are far less ambitious. I think the bowl turned out beautifully despite the minor failures.
Oh yeah, I've seen Broinwood's work. I've been using VCarve for most all my v-carve work and inlays, but I was just discussing it with someone on Facebook about doing it in Fusion. I might have to give it a try in Fusion again, as it looks like they enhanced the v-carve toolpath a bit since I last looked at it (It's called Engrave).
I have been playing with inlays for a long time. It is not easy. To avoid the chipout try doing your inlays using endgrain plugs. grain direction plays an important part when doing inlays.
Good idea! Maybe I should have tried the plugs with just engrain pieces. I’ve done this for my spoons with inlays, but I didn’t even think about it for this project. More stuff to try! Thanks!!
YES! I was going to go into it in the video, but I thought it was too boring to talk about. Bottom line: the vector wasn't "clean". Long details: For a single "plug", I was drawing one half and mirroring it. Then rotating the mirror'ed shape in a circle pattern. My first error was the curves were not completely tangent to each other. This meant the cutter wouldn't be able to cut the same shape in the plug and the hole. My next error was in mirroring; you need to ensure your mirrored half is snapped to the mirror line. Mine wasn't, and it was just ever so slightly off. This problem was multiplied when I did the circle pattern, creating a slightly different shape in each hole. Visually it sort of looked okay until I zoomed way in. I snapped it to the mirror line, and fixed the tangent issue, and then the shape was a good size that could be machined out. This allowed one plug to fit into any given hole.
You can download the Fusion file and zoom into the Plug sketch. It is "fixed" in that version, but I think you can go back in history and see the broken version at some point.
