Yep! And the old ways are fun too. One of these days I’ll make the video of doing it on the chevalet. I’ll skip marquetry with a knife, though, I don’t really enjoy doing that.
Hey Scott, Vladimir from NTD TV here. I contacted you via email offering to raise awareness of your channel. I look forward to your thoughts. Best regards, Vladimir Holecka
Hi, I'm sorry you didn't find the time to talk to us about a possible collaboration. I hope this will be possible in the future. I wish you a wonderful day. Kind regards, Vladimir NTD Television
Great video. Hopefully trying this myself soon and there aren’t a lot of videos about it. How would you compare the accuracy of the laser cuts to the traditional methods? Can you get the pieces to fit pretty tightly without any gaps? Also have you tried masking tape to prevent burnt edges?
Thanks! The laser is pretty accurate, but it can miss that hand made look if that’s important. The pieces can fit very tightly once you dial in the right offset. I have the most trouble with pieces that have a lot of curves, but it’s easy enough to recut and dial it in. I have tried masking the veneer but it didn’t make enough difference to be with the trouble in most cases. For really light woods I might consider masking.
great video, I watched your other videos and wondering if you could advise if getting a CO2 laser or a Shaper Origin first? I'm a wannabe maker (looking to make wall art, signage/plaques, jewellery/vanity boxes). Your advice and wisdom would be greatly appreciated
Nice video. If you did the kerf offset using the offset tool, then why did you need to put the kerf into the “laser plugin” box? I want to do this method but that confused me
Not entirely. The laser burns the material so the best you can do is find the speed and power settings that result in the least amount of charring for the material. This particular project uses light woods next to other light woods and that’s going to accentuate it much more than if dark woods were used.
At time 15:11 when you say "sand it up to 220" did you cut the piece down to size where the veneer is flush with the wood block? or does the sanding remove the edges of the veneer from the back wood?
Yeah, I cut the piece down to size on the table saw first. I'll generally have the background veneer be a bit larger than what the final piece size is and cut the piece down. You can also cut the substrate piece to size before gluing the veneer down and use a knife to trim the overhanging veneer to the piece size but I usually use the former method.
Which model glowforge were you using in this video? Are these similar to the Chinese models I see? Finally, when will the other series come out. Very interesting material for marquetarians.
This is the Glowforge Pro, but everything could be done on the Basic. I haven't used any of the Chinese models, but I can't think of any reason why one couldn't do marquetry with them. The key is having a way to hold the veneers flat, as long as they're flat it's just cutting. I'm shooting for next Wednesday for the scroll saw video, and the Wednesday after that for the chevalet video.
It was more because it's a fairly dark wood and even with the sand shading there wasn't a lot of distinction between the pieces. It kind of looked like a big purple blob to me.
Scott Barron Furniture instead of using the sand to discolor the wood, have you tried having the laser burn the effect instead? I was looking at using Purple Heart for a project on my Glowforge shortly.
I have done some experiments with that! Defocusing the laser can get you to something approximating the shading. It doesn't look quite the same, the gradient isn't nearly as smooth, but I think it could be used to good effect. The tricky part is that you generally cut mirrored (so glue side up) to minimize the visible kerf on the show face. So you'd either need to cut show side up and incorporate that stronger visual kerf into the design, or try and get things lined up after assembly which could be pretty difficult.