Ebony Dove

First of all I apologize since I didn't have my camera with me for most of it.  I bought a very large piece of ebony meant more for a lathe.  I thought I could 'slice' the block into smaller pieces and do my inlay on those.  I first tried with my Mitre Saw but I no support for the wood since it was a rectangle and I had slice with the wood standing end to end in order to match the grain.  I took a first pass and the blade smoked and a hunk of ebony went flying... :-o 

Plan B:  Buy a box wood saw at Lowes.  They didn't really have what I wanted, most of them were plastic.  I ended up buying a cheap plastic one and wish I hadn't.  Totally worthless.

Plan C:  Call a friend :-)  He had a bigger table saw with a ten inch blade.  It took us a good 40 minutes and lots of smoke and a new blade...  We were only able to cut up half the block! 

Note to self:  Purchase PRE CUT ebony from now on... it's worth it!

I had learned a couple things from the last project.  I won't go through the steps again, just refer to Dove Inlay.  I used super glue this time to hold down the dove and it worked much better.  The area that was giving me issues were the bottom of the Dove where it gets real thin.  Just the process of running a scribe next to it would bend it and distort the bottom.\

I had also purchased a 1/32 inch router for the dremel nbsp; That absolutely helped a lot...  I still had to the ends of the bottom with a chisel and gouge.  Last time I had some problems fitting the inlay into the channel.  I kept widening it but in reality I just don't think it was deep enough.  I went about 1/16 of an inch deeper than I did with the last one.  It didn't just "fall in" but was much better than last time.  Also since I didn't use a chisel on the main part I didn't have to use the sanding bit either.

These bits are very small and fragile.  I did break one already.  If you see smoke, stop < lol >  They worked very well and gave me a consistent bite.

A little about ebony.  Here is a picture of ebony in it's natural state.

They say that ebony, like any wood, ebony is subject to drying and cracking: especially in dry climates.  The manager of a store also told me that wood had been there for over 2 1/2 years.  Even though it was wrapped in a wax coating,  I have notice several cracks.  Not bad and I do live in Colorado which is a very dry climate.  I am trying soaking one of the blocks overnight to see if it helps.

The wood itself was great for carving.  Very firm, responsive to cutting and routing.  The chips and sawdust were very beautiful, with deep red and brown hues running through it.  I have included a picture above, while not a good picture, really shows the color of the wood.

Here is the finished product.  The flash really showed of the color of the Mother of Pearl.  Unfortunately for this particular inlay I broke the head into four separate pieces by accident.  I was able to super glue some parts so that I had two pieces.  I prepared my epoxy and this time added in ebony sawdust to color the glue.  Although I had a much better fit this time, I have an area or two that could use a little extra color.