After I did the mirrors, my friends friend wanted the tatoo on his arm put on his bike.
Three hours later he had it as a cover plate on the brake reservoir.
Take a picture, import image into CAD, draw over it, dxf out, create G code and machine.
If you have ever done hand inlay work via hand engraving, well, CNC beats a hammer and graver!

can you tell me which cad program you use yo import, draw and export?

Thanks

Hi,
Please excuse my ignorance. I assume that the blank is aluminium but what is the red colour material please ?.

Hi Rich,

One more question please.

I am assuming that the pattern was cut into the blank with an endmill but how do you then get the copper in ?.

I am asking because this is something I would like to be able to do if only I knew how to do it.

Best regards.

Rich,
  Very, Very informative!...How fortunate the purveyors of Mach3,  that
we have an open classroom to practically any machining operation imaginable,
whether it be fine metal work such as yours Rich, or lathe work from Hood,
electronics from Chip, milling from Brian and Brett,...the list of unselfish  experts
who regularly share their knowledge with total strangers such as myself, is to say the least,
a rarity in this tough world we live in.
  Art, did you have any idea a few years ago what " band of brothers" you were assembling
when your brainchild hit the net? Sheer genius!!
  Many Thanks to all regular contributors (too numerous to even count!) Who give me and others
with less skills and knowledge (I'm speaking of myself  ) the helping hand to jump into a very
 complicated, but rewarding field!
  Rich, beautiful inlays!
Thanks, Glenn

Thanks Rich for such a detailed description of the process. I will certainly start practicing now and if I manage to make anything presentable I will post pictures.

Thanks again and best regards,

Tweakie.

It seems that the posting relating to exactly how it has been done has been deleted

Tweakie.

I don't know about you, Tweaks, but I feel cheated. To make matters even worse, he even referred me to this thread. He's probably laughing maniacally at the both of us, right now.

He's probably laughing maniacally at the both of us

I am laughing,  since i couldn't have accomplished setting you up like that if i wanted to...just not that clever!

Don't know where the how to reply went but here is how it's done.

Mill the outline you will inlay to about 1/2 the depth of the wire. Cut width should be very close to wire diameter.
In this case it's Al plate, so the wire must be soft and thus some copper wire was used. Undercut the bottom corners edges by scribing or actualy chasing around the bottom corners. Idealy the side walls of the milled flat bottom slot would be beveled some. In engraving you actualy make a cut all along the perimeter af the corner. When the wire is hammered into the cut it forms to the bevel and can't come out. You carefully work / peen the wire starting at one end and into the other end of the cut. You can use a nice flat punch to peen the wire down and make sure that the plate is sitting flat on something solid. Hopefully / you should not mark the plate surface. You will be left with excess wire above the surface, and for a flat surface, all one needs to do is make some few fine surfacing cuts at high speed to remove the excess. You can also just cut the excess off using a chasing hammer and the right engraving tool. You want to get it down as close as possible to the surface. Now you just carefully polish it flat over a flat surface topped fine emery / sandpaper.

Then use something like mag wheel polish or silver polish and it will discolor the wire and make it dark but leave the Al bright.

I am thinking it took me about 3 hours, start to finish, to inlay the part shown.


RICH