Wood_Butcher wrote on Jul 6th, 2008 at 1:02pm:dochughes,
I am in awe of you abalone purflings

. Can you direct me towards any info on the techniques that you used on them?
Thanks,
Mark
Thanks, Mark. I was a little nervous about the process, but it proved to be very simple. I got the paua inlay material from Hana Lima. I know I've seen the instructions elsewhere, but the only place I can find them this AM is on the Stew-Mac website, and it's only a picture.
Shell inlay pictureHere is a brief rundown of the procedure, since it doesn't say much on that web page: I was using the Hana Lima faux tortoise shell binding (which is actually polyethylene and very easy to work with), so I used
Stew-Mac's Weld-On Cement for gluing on the binding. At the time that I glued on the binding I also glued on the black/white/black accent strips with a strip of the no-stick filler strip in between, just like it shows in the picture.
That filler strip really works as advertised - after allowing time for the glue to dry, I just popped it right out, which created a perfect channel for the paua strips. Adding those was really fun - you just slip them in the channel, and as you go around the curves you break off pieces in lengths short enough to make the curve. most of the time I did that with my fingers, but sometimes I needed a pair of needle nosed pliers for breaking the shorter pieces.
Anyway, once I had them broken to length and fit in the channel I flowed super glue over it until all the spaces around the shell were filled. Sanding down that hard shell flush with the soundboard was the toughest part of the whole procedure. Scraper may work better.