It's been a while, and not a lot of progress.
I got the pickup routes done. I cut a template on the CNC, positioned it and routed out the cavities. The bright birdseye maple is way too stark.
I recently made a dining room table which I covered in "table top" epoxy. One of the parts is about the consistency of cold molasses, the other part is the consistency of caulk, it's very thick. Since I had a little left over I figured I'd use that for the inlay. When I was "pouring" out the thicker stuff it plopped out in a blob on my workbench and a bit dropped in the cup I was mixing in. It was impossible to know how much dropped in the cup, but it looked about even to what was already in there, it wasn't and the epoxy never cured.
I had already planed off the first headstock skin due to the router slip. I had to plane off this one as well. I used the CNC, it works well for that job, though I kind of wish I didn't know that.
This time I figured I'd do the inlay before gluing, that way if I mess it up I won't be planing for a third time. I have some fresh epoxy, but I don't have any other projects coming up, so I am reluctant to open it and have it go bad over time. I did try to make mother of pearl inlays with the CNC, but the pieces are just too small, I broke 2 pieces pretty quickly and decided that wasn't going to work.
I figured I'd go the other direction with the birdseye maple and dye it black, I'll do that on both the pickup covers and the headstock. It's going to be tricky to fill the inlay without going over as I can't sand it. I struggled a bit thinking about order of operations to get this done, we'll see if I can pull this off. The other consideration is what the sides of the headstock plate will look like once it's cut to size, I doubt the dye will have penetrated evenly. I figure I can either dye the edges once they are exposed or do a binding. We'll see.
I love the look of this dyed birdseye. I've got a fair amount of that wood in stock, maybe my next top will be dyed birdseye
