Woodturning Mineral Inlay Experiment

Welcome back to my shop. In this week we're going to try a little bit of inlays, which is something I have absolutely no experience in, but I thought it's about time that I'll do something about it. So what we have here are two pieces of oak. Here in Italy it's called rovere, and I think that in English it's called Irish oak or Welsh oak. So it's a nicely almost orange colored oak. It's very dense. And these pieces are not prime pieces. There's a large crack over here and some cracks over here, but those are test pieces, so I don't mind the cracks and the defects. And what I have here are two different stones or crystals or minerals. What we have here, the green one, is aventurine. And let me get it closer to you. As you can see, I've picked up... I'm trying to focus here. Okay, so I've picked up a couple of bags of these small fragments of aventurine, which is a green mineral. And maybe I should have researched before about the hardness of these stones, since in one of my tests I'm going to try and sand these flat. And the other one, let me bring it into focus, and the other one, as you can see, is the citrine, which is an orange mineral. And I actually see that inside the bag there are some purple fragments, probably amethysts. These two pieces of oak, we're going to chuck them up with the wormwood screw. We're going to round them up, just so I won't hurt my knuckles on them. We're going to flatten them out and clean up the faces. And we're going to create two grooves in them, and also the other one. Two grooves, which later on I will fill with the citrine and the aventurine. And one of them I will leave as it is, and the other one I'm going to try and sand down. And then I will be able also to compare the effect that I'm getting from leaving the stones untouched and natural, and the effect I'm getting when I'm sanding them down flat, and see if it's worth the effort. Let's do it. A couple of grooves, not too deep, about two or three millimeters deep. Maybe I can make them a little bit deeper. It's not a powder I'm trying to inlay here, so I'll make it a little bit deeper. Okay, and now we'll do the other one. That should do it. So, these are our two test pieces. One of them we're going to inlay the citrine on the inside, the other the citrine on the outside, the aventurine on the outside, and the aventurine on the inside. One of them we're going to sand flat, and one we're going to leave natural, and see how we like that idea. So, let's prepare some epoxy and glue some crystals in the wood. Okay, so I have everything set up here at my lathe, because my table is too bogged down with other stuff on it. And I have this plank clamped to my lathe bed lightly, so I wouldn't knock it off with my foot or anything else. I've got the citrine here, the aventurine here, I've got the epoxy glue, the resin and the hardener, a couple of popsicle sticks, a plastic container to mix the glue in, and of course my test pieces, which we'll go to in a minute. First I'm going to do a dry test, and just pour the stones in, just to see how they sit inside. To get a feel for the quantity that I will need to fill these rings up. That looks about right, and it looks quite nice, if I might say so, from looking at the screen. That is the dry test for the aventurine. Let's put it all back. Okay, and let's do a small dry test with the citrine. That's the citrine, and it also looks nice, although it might look nicer on a darker wood. Let's put it back. And I think I'll start with the glue run, using the aventurine on the inside. I don't know exactly the quantities that I will need, so this will be a trial and error thing. I don't know why I turned white like this, I've never done that before. So it's been a little bit more than a couple of hours, more like a couple of days since I've glued this up. So obviously now it is completely cured. Let me focus here. So I really like the way the aventurine came out. I'll try to keep it in the center. A little bit less than the citrine. And the epoxy that I've used, as you remember, it turned a little white for some reason. As you can see, I hope, it also dried a little bit white. I don't know if it's from bubbles. I think I've read somewhere in the past that if some moisture is introduced into the epoxy, then it will turn white. So I'm not sure if it's a moisture problem. So the sanding is done with 600 grit. I've applied the... I used denatured alcohol between grits to clean off the dust. Now we're going to apply the finish. I'm going to use the abrasive wax and then the friction polish. And we'll see how much of the color will come back into this. You can see the stones are sanded flat. And I've applied the finish to the wood and the stone. And we'll take a closer look at this later on. Now we'll try the other one. And instead of sanding the stones flat, we're going to leave those stones proud. Only, we're going to try and clean up a little bit the wood. And see how that works. And what I mean is, I'm going to try, using my parting tool, maybe a scraper, to go in and clean the wood everywhere which is not my stone circle. And I want to see if I'll be able to straighten it out. Or would it cause all the small stones to just fly off completely. That's just perfect. Let me see if we can zoom in on this. Let's see if we can copy from this. As you can see, it completely chipped out my parting tool. Completely chipped out. I think the epoxy and the stones are a little bit too much for this steel. And this is the result of our experiment. As you can see, at the end, I've left this one as deep as it was. And I wasn't able even to cut through the side of the stones. We still have this one, this test. Let me focus. Which I think came out really nice. A few things that I need to consider is, one, get a better glue that won't dry out white. And also make sure I put enough of the glue inside to fill the voids completely. I might even consider using epoxy with a little bit of dye in it. And it will probably be the thing that I will try the next. This is when I'm talking about the aventurine. When I'm talking about the citrine, obviously a thicker layer would be much preferable. And the same issue as here. Make sure that I fill in all the voids, either with stones or with glue. So I'm very encouraged by this test. And I think I'm going to have to try and go for incorporating some stone inlays in my next project. Whatever project that would be. Thank you very much for joining me in this week's video. And I hope to see you back in my shop really soon.