Thread: WIP- 33pc inlayed viking truss rod cover

G'day all,
Thought I'd put up a post of my latest project. I'm not sure if it belongs here in the CNC section, or in the Musical Instruments, but as it's being made on a CNC, this part of the forums will do. The instrument people will no doubt find it.

An inlayed truss rod cover with 33 pieces of shell (White MOP, Black MOP, Paua and Pink Abalone) set into rosewood. Some of the pearl pieces are no bigger than 1x2mm and while it looks manageable in the design phase, once it's cut out and sitting in the pearl safe, they're a LOT smaller than first thought!

I've needed a truss rod cover for my guitar since I first built it a few years ago, and thought it's now or never. So, I took a screen grab from internet that looked pretty good of a viking and converted to vector format, split the various parts into pearl colors (at this stage, I hadn't planned on using pink abalone, that was an after thought)

All done on a Roland EGX600, using (for the most part) a 0.3mm two flute fish tailed bit running at 1.2mm/sec feed and 2mm/sec plunge speed with a plunge depth of 0.12mm for the pearl. The rosewood let me speed things up a bit, so the pocketing op was a fair bit faster and went for 5mm/sec feed and plunge.

Current status is waiting, waiting, waaaaiiiiting for the 2 pack epoxy to cure........

Anyway, the pictures are pretty much self evident, so I'll leave it at that and hope you enjoy!