How to Create a Bowtie Inlay

This pine cookie is gonna become a table, I think a really beautiful table. It's got this huge crack in it, so what I want to do here is cut a succession of butterflies, bow ties, and they'll bridge the crack. Succession because, big one, medium one, little one. And I'll show you how to make the butterflies and bow ties themselves, and how to blend them into the tabletop. It's gonna look really cool. First step is to figure out in broad brush strokes where I want the bow ties to go. What I'm doing is marking out what by eyeball I think'll be the center of each bow tie. Do take notice of that sanding block nearby. That's my eraser, so that if I change my mind I can take the lines off and move them, which I ended up doing a couple of times. With the locations determined, I also sketched out the size of bow ties I wanted to use. And now I'm measuring those sketches to figure out how big to actually cut the bow ties. Each one is incrementally larger than the previous. The medium is a half inch bigger than the small, the large is a half inch bigger than the medium. I'm sharpening a charcoal white pencil here on a piece of sandpaper. Charcoal white because that's a whole lot easier to see on this walnut than a conventional pencil would be. The bevel square is set to 12 degrees, which is a good angle for these bow ties, good angle for dovetails in general. And each blank is already cut to the outside dimensions of the bow tie: the right length and the right width. So I just have to go from corner to middle, corner to middle with my layout lines. Next, head for the bandsaw and cut on the waste side, the outside, of each line. We're gonna come back and clean these up later, so the cut doesn't have to be perfect. No bandsaw in your shop? You could also do this with a handsaw. Same technique. Stay to the outside of the line, and we'll rely on a chisel in just a little bit to clean up the cuts. Have a look at my control here. What I'm doing is I'm letting the heels of my hand rest on the bandsaw table, and letting my fingers do the walking, if you remember what that means. Using just my fingers gives me much better control of the cut, and much better accuracy. ♪ Clean up, clean up ♪ ♪ Everybody do their share ♪ So, yeah. I have kids. Now we have to clean up those bandsaw cuts. And notice that I have the tip of the chisel skewed across the surface, rather than just bulldozing straight down it. I find that it makes it a lot easier to get a good quality cut. What we're trying to do here is get a straight edge, and we're also, of course, eliminating all of the ridges from the bandsaw cut. Be really careful here to make sure you don't introduce an angle to that edge. The edge needs to remain perpendicular to the face. When you get to the waist of the bow tie, you'll need to come down from each side, getting it to meet in the center. Don't pry with your chisel, just let the chisel make the cut. Then I like to use the edge of the chisel to eyeball that edge, make sure it's dead straight. If you look closely you can see the layout lines still on the pine cookie here that indicate the center of the bow ties. So honestly, what I'm doing here is just eyeballing these things, figuring out where I want 'em. Because the crack is kind of at a curve, I'm allowing the bow ties to sweep around that curve, too. We did a bunch of freehand bandsaw work, and freehand chisel work, and that's okay because now we're tracing that bow tie, and whatever shape it is, that's the shape that we're gonna put onto the pine cookie and cut a recess for. However, you should use a piece of sandpaper and keep a nice needle point on your pencil. We want a good, crisp line, not a line made by a crayola here. Otherwise it's gonna be impossible to be accurate. An alternative to marking these out with our needle sharp pencil, would be to use a marking knife. And normally that's what I would do, but for video purposes I gotta use a pencil or you can't see the lines. Next step is to get the waste out of that bow tie recess. This is best done with a plunge router, so you can go straight in and straight outta that recess. I'm using a quarter inch diameter bit, and depth of cut is set slightly less than the thickness of our material. First step is to get a bunch of waste out of the center of the recess, and then slowly work your way towards that layout line. With a quarter inch diameter bit, we can only get so close to the tight inside corners created by the bow tie, but we're gonna do something different in a second to took care of that. If you're not sure about doing this cut freehand, trace that bow tie onto a piece of scrap and try it there before you come to your finished piece. Look closely here and you'll see that this is an eighth inch diameter bit now. The eighth inch diameter bit lets me get way tighter in those inside corners, so there's less chisel work in the next step. Now the reason I use two cutters is that the quarter inch bit will remove waste faster than the eighth inch bit. But the eighth inch bit gives me a much better opportunity for detailing this. The better job I can do with the router, the less work I have to do with the bench chisel. Ladies and gentlemen, sharpen your chisels. We want to have a good sharp bench chisel here and pare away the waste. Working our way gently and conservatively back to that pencil line. I'm not using a mallet, I'm just getting my body weight over the butt end of the chisel and pushing down. And I'm gonna do frequent tests to see if the bow tie fits or not. Keep in mind that because we freehand cut on the bandsaw, and we freehand pared with the chisel, there is most likely only one distinct way each bow tie will go into the recess. Make sure you're doing it the right way. This recess is still just a little bit too tight, so I gotta come back and do a little more work to clean it up. Be very careful as you pare down that you're keeping the walls of the recess perpendicular to the face of your project. Don't introduce an angle here, or you're gonna be in trouble later. Now, once we get to where this is close, don't push it in too far or you're never gonna get it back out. That looks good. Yellow glue works fine for what we're doing here. We just want to get some glue on the bottom of the recesses. Don't worry about getting it up on the sidewalls. Plenty of surface area between the face of the bow tie and the bottom face of our recess. As you start to tap these in, be gentle and persuade them. It's great to put a block over the top. What we don't want to do is take the chance of snapping off the sharp corners of the bow tie. That goes back to that twelve degree angle. Angle's too sharp, it's too easy to snap the bow ties. After the glue is dry, use a sander or block plane to flush the bow tie to the surface. Now if you have a little hairline gap along your bow tie, like I do on this one, put a little yellow glue in the gap and get the excess glue off the surface. Then while the glue is still wet, run a 120 grit or so sander over the top, and the sawdust and glue will mix to make a perfect patch. Well, not only are the bow ties done, the whole table is done. I got hairpin legs on the bottom, I as a finish used a base coat of shellac and a top coat of water based lacquer. I love the overall look. I'm really happy with how the bow ties came out, I'm really happy with how the table came out. This was a great project.