That turned out great David!
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Thank you for the kind words, Britt and Doug. I suppose I’m on the hook for a couple more now. Dear daughter seems to think that they’d make a nice family Christmas gift for each of her brothers. Slow as I am, I’d better get started now… 
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I’m still playing with boxes and inlays… as I said, I’m on the hook for Christmas gifts for kids and families. I must admit it’s far less stressful to start now than wait until the last minute…
The inlays are pretty much living up to their “easy inlays” moniker… sufficient detail to allow almost anything I see fit to put on a box.
I am at a loss however to explain one thing that I am seeing: i.e. no clue why some of my pockets and inlay pieces seem oddly immune to sidewall charring, though obviously burnt nearly ~4mm deep in the ~6mm thick substrate pieces…
I think that’s why I’m starting to see such clean lines on some of my inlays… little or no signs of soot in the interface. This one in particular came out nice…
but most of my recent inlays are looking a lot cleaner.
Thoughts on why no charred sidewalls? Hardly there yet but this seems close(r) to the theoretical ideal of two adjacent “molecules” when lasered… one is completely vaporized while the other is left totally undisturbed? <ducking…>
– David
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I’m seriously in love with this stuff, and at the very early stages of book learnin’ about it - is there a chance that you’ve set your focus point a reasonable distance below the surface, and therefore the beam is more diffused at surface level?
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Actually I focus on the surface of the material, Peter. I do a “line after fill” sequence that maybe explains it… the bulk of the material is burnt away during the “fill” step (a raster operation) and then I outline it with a “finishing pass” (a vector operation) to clean up the edges. I also use full air-assist which leaves little or no debris in the cut… and I usually don’t have to brush or blow out anything and can just glue it up straight from the laser.
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I’ve been having a hard time making up my mind on what the family Christmas box lid inlay should look like and it’s really taking a toll on the amount of usable OLD walnut I have. It’s really putting my woodworking skills (or lack thereof) to the test…
Ala Goldilocks, I started with the big bold monogram… and it quickly began looking too big and garish to me…
Looking for something a bit more subtle and “scripty”… but this one still looked a bit too blocky and “mechanical” to me…
Finally found one TLAR (“just right”?) and have about settled (I think…) on it…
I want to do MINIMAL wood fill/repair to retain the rustic look and yet have buttery smooth feel to the surfaces and edges. I’m very happy with the inlays themselves – these are maple and walnut – and have been great fun and good practice. The box sides and ends are planked out of a 70+ year old pecan tree my great grandmother and I planted in about 1950.
– David
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That first Johnson is rather large. I’m surprised it fit in the box…* cough * (sorry)
I agree with the small script. Beautiful work as always. 
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what font is that richey? I think I have something I want to make with that…
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It’s “Sachi Script”… found it out on Dafonts.com. Small mods to slightly thicken the lettering and put white space in the “e” for inlay…
– David
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Can you imagine what she would say if you told her you cut that inlay with a robot wielding laser while you enjoyed a beverage and watched from your arm chair?
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How cool would that be? I’ve been blessed to see so much change in 77 years but I must admit I miss, in many ways, the simpler times I grew up in. I was so into trombone and big band music in my teenage years, her greatest joy would have been for me to be in Lawrence Welk’s band… she never missed his TV show. She would also have frowned on my drinking…
– David
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Great Grandmothers never quite understand. Some things never change. 
My tenth birthday party was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles party and we used to go to the local skating rink a lot.
The rink is still there, so we had a TMNT themed party there for my 40th with my kids and their friends. It hits totally different. But it is nice to remember what I used to be like.
I do miss being a wild kid on a bike. But I don’t miss paper maps.
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This made me laugh… by habit, I equip my cars with:
- A snow brush
- Booster cables
- Tire Inflator
- A Rand-McNally Road Atlas
The one in my current car is a 2022 edition, (I see the current 2024 is the 100th anniversary edition) and I think I’ve never opened it, except to put a cover protector on it. The last time I actually USED one was probably a road trip I took in 1996… The last time I used booster cables was probably not far from that.
The snow brush… well, this is Canada, eh?
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To say nothing of chopping down that tree! 
A friend is a paramedic who does driver and navigation training for recruits. On map reading day, she gives her students a location she knows is on the centrefold of the map book, and takes evil pleasure out of watching them use the old “two finger expand” gesture to make it clearer.
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Cover protection is that a oversized pocket protector?
Lol no. It’s a clear vinyl jacket that goes over the book to protect it from spills and whatever might be on the floor mats. Mostly it keeps whatever else I might stick in the glove box from messing it up. (Kind of like the vinyl bag that the owner’s manual and features book come in.)
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Sadly, though it looked like a beautiful mature pecan tree, it had become infested with borers and bugs and was starting to drop quite large branches with any wind at all. I had been parking both my truck and car under it… and one day the truck only narrowly missed being hit with a large 8"-ish in diameter branch. So, as I started sawing up the limbs and making planks for my boxes, I was able to see all the damage the borers had done. And limbs continued to break and fall… so, we decided to trim the large hanging branches back, and left only the trunk and central branches standing.
The upside is that the wood is, in its own way, beautiful – with dark streaks and imperfections that lend “character” to it… and I have plenty of it to keep me busy for the duration. 
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I had a cell phone (for emergencies) in 1999, but not a smart phone. I was driving in downtown Denver one afternoon with a girl from my high school and we were lost. I pulled up to a stop light and rolled down my window to ask the driver in the next car if he knew where I was supposed to go. He said no. But at the next stop light he handed me a map of Colorado on one side and Denver on the other. Thank you kind stranger, you absolute legend. I had that map in several of my cars since then.
I met my wife in college. I bought an iphone 3G on our honeymoon and used google maps to get everywhere in the cities we visited.
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Still piddlin’ with boxes and inlays…
My eldest son came to visit for a couple of days. Had occasion to demonstrate to him how I’ve been doing these inlays. Simply screen captured an image of a nice butterfly off the net, quickly processed it in Lightburn using easy inlay method outlined at beginning of this thread, and then lasered it on small pieces of walnut and maple… butterfly is about 70 mm tall.
Forgot to photo the pocket but here’s the inlay straight off the laser…
Thought it turned out nice enough to share.
– David
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