Silver Wire Inlays

There are several videos on wire inlay, and the ABS school teaches a class on it. Joe Keeslar is good at it, and as said above, has a kit with instructions.


Bill Moran taught me how to do it.
The wood needs to be fine grain, not too hard, and not brittle. Curly maple is a good starter wood. The wire is called jewelers wire, and is a flat strip about 24 gage and 2mm wide (get half-hard temper).You make a tool (or a set of them) from old hack saw blades. They look like small engraving tools. The blade is ground to the thickness of the wire, and about 3mm long ( to make a cut 3mm deep). Harden and temper the blade, and mount it in a wooden handle, and sharpen the edge. Make them in 2,4,and 6mm blade widths. 6mm is about as wide as works well. Sketch the design on paper, then re-draw it on the wood in pencil. Start making the cuts by pushing the tool into the wood, rocking it out, re-inserting it just down the line....and so forth until you have cut all that line. To insert the wire, draw it through a piece of folded 120 grit sandpaper to stiffen it and put a slight roughness to the sides. Using a very small mallet, tap the end into the cut and tap your way GENTLY along as it goes in. There is a lot more to it than this, but this should give you the idea. Bill Moran has a video on handles and wire inlay that shows the whole process well.
 
Do you have any tips on making the groove in hard materials like micarta, or is this something you usually only do on wood?
 
Cutting the wire channel in the wood separates the fibers, The wire is tapped down into this slot, and the wood grips it from the sides. The slightly roughened sides of the silver wire provide more than enough grip strength. Trying to do this in a hard material would be very difficult to nearly impossible.

As far as glue goes, none is normally used. There may be spots where a wire is not fitting right due to the slit being cut wrong or some other problem. In these places, a drop of thin CA will solve any problems.

A tip on clean-up after tapping the wire down is to first file the wire and the wood with a fine file. If you sand/grind it first, the metal swarf may get rubbed into the wood and stain it. Once the excess metal is removed and the surface is cleaned up with the file, gentle sanding with attention to avoiding rubbing in the sanding dust will finish the task. Picking the right type of paper is also important. Black SC paper isn't what you want here...use open coat AO.
 
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