Quote:
Originally Posted by Archaic Guitars
This rosette is amazing! Great design and I love the idea is using found materials. Would you be willing to reveal how you crush the stones? And how you flatten the stone inlay after glueing? My block plane is giving me the stink eye even as I type this question.
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For the section in the upper left (around 10:00) I used crushed coal -- basically I wacked a small piece of coal a couple of times with a hammer to get a mix of finer dust and small chunks. I mixed that with some gel CA glue and filled the cavity. The coal is very prone to shatter (why I decided to crush it and not try cutting it) but thankfully sands quite easily.
Moving counter-clockwise the next three sections were all sliced, thicknessed, and shaped stones with no crushing. To get those prepared I was a bit all over the place depending on the hardness, tendency to crack, etc. that varied from stone to stone. Basically though I got enough of a flat spot on each stone (belt sander or diamond stone) to glue the uncut stone to a block and pass it through a tile saw. I only had access to a cheapo tile saw so this step required a good bit of messing around to get a deep enough cut for any type of reasonable slice. Lots and lots of grinding and sanding to get to the final thickness and shape after that. The three sections of stone were all inlayed slightly below the surface (~.5mm) so that by the time I'm fully sanded there should just be a small gap that I'll top off with a finishing resin of some sort. I definitely don't have an ideal setup to do this type of work but made it work in the end. There's a lapidary club (stone and gem cutting) in Montreal that you can get access to proper machines but unfortunately it's currently closed due to covid.
Hope that all makes sense!