Twisted Copper Inlay Experiments #2

Left off last time with the epoxied boards clamped up to dry.

Another weekend arrives and I unclamp everything and pull off the top layer of masking tape.



"Perfect Red" TransTint and blue mica colored epoxy.

Seems there was a leak in a few of my end holes!



Tape "plugs" gave way. Message to self: don't drill all the way through next time, duh!



Picking off the excess tape is as fun as picking off a scab, that is until you get enough sharp slivers of epoxy under your fingernails to switch to a scraper 8^)

I also gave each board a quick "bump" on the belt sander to remove any little stickers pointing up.



Now for the secret sauce!

Before this, I would just run each strip through the drum sander w/80 grit. Very light cuts (1/128").
This works wonderfully and has no clogging or other ill effects on the sander, but there are a few problems.

1. It is very slow. With the light cuts it takes a lot of time to remove material to expose the deeper pattern I'm after

2. Lots of heat! The copper gets hot enough to be painful to touch. This heat also weakens the epoxy.

The heat combined with #1 means I have to wait a minute or so between passes so the copper can cool.

Being impatient, in my best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice. "Get to the choppar!"

Bench planer that is! 8^)

Before anyone screams out how I'll kill my self and burn down the town, I've done this before and it works quite well.

Benefits are the metal does not heat up in any significant way so the material removal is about 10x faster.



Cuts are about 1/8 turn of the handle per pass.

My blades are nicked and well worn, but after the process I removed the blades and other than some copper coloring below the blades, absolutely no ill effect.

This photo shows the extent, the short row of striations is the finely crafted and honed planer blade. You can see a fine line of the copper dust just below. I pulled the blades afterwards and zero impact on the edge and retainer.


The reason for bending down the ends of the twisted wire and stuffing them into the holes is to make sure no end pops up and gets grabbed by the planer blades.

My first test of using the planer did just that as I was cutting past the 1/2 way mark through the twist. I heard a small click from the planer and saw a short 1/4" section had been torn from the epoxy. Nothing was ejected from the planer and certainly was far less dramatic than planing birds eye pine with the micro knots.

Either way, go over 1/2 through the twist and the top wire is no longer one piece and will begin to fall apart.

These two photos show the blue and red boards after the first few cuts.





I'm not quite down to the wood surface yet.

You can see, especially on the blue, that the bottom wire has progressed further than the top.

Even though I was fairly careful in my attempts to get the twists-per-inch the same on each wire, the top ended up with a higher TPI count and thus presented a different profile.

As the cuts progress, a different pattern emerges. The next few closeups show that change:











Once the "dots" appear and are almost separate, that is about as far as I can go without compromising the structure.


You can see the typical planer scalloping which cleans up when I switch to the ROS and 150 grit


Finer grits eliminate the sander marks




These were done with the ROS at 320.

A scrub with #4/0 wool and mineral spirits to check the finish contrast shows what it will all look like in a project


That's it!

I wanted to see what shapes appear as I cut deeper and I saw a few good targets for further use.

The initial cuts leave a nice cross hatch, go a bit further and the centers get skinnier leaving the blobish ends.
Eventually a series of linked dots appear, then they separate and that is about the end of what can be done.

Thanks for dropping in and hopefully you can find this useful!