…stringing details.

Stringing On Finished Top

This detail adds a great amount of drama to the finished piece, and no it is not painted on. It is thin black veneer inlaid into the top. Normally I would hand cut the veneer with a veneer saw or a sharp knife, but I had heard of people using a pasta maker to cut the thin strips needed for this detail. It certainly was faster, but the end product was greatly inferior. It tended to cut along the grain and splintered in many places. I ended up planing each individual piece of stringing to get an edge that would slide easily into the grooves.

Planing Stringing

It is always easier to plane small pieces like these by placing the plane upside down in my bench vice and carefully sliding the stringing veneer over the plane.

Normally I would use a scratch stock and slowly scratch the groove into the top. But in another effort to speed things along I turned to a small Dremel fitted with a base and router bit from Stewart MacDonald, primarily a guitar maker’s catalog but it has lots of interesting tools for furniture makers too. I clamped a long straight edge to the top and, after carefully marking the start and stop points, routed out the groove. In retrospect I would go slower and make a couple of passes because I broke two of the router bits. (I am glad I ordered extras.)

Dremel and Straight Edge

After routing the groove along the length of the top, I started preparing the inlay strips. I did not have a strips long enough to do the entire length so I had to scarf the pieces together.

Creating Scarf Joint

I took two pieces and laid them on top of each other and used a chisel to make an angled cut in the two pieces at once. Now the two pieces would match up perfectly and the joint would virtually disappear. (In the background of the picture you can see the scratch stock I usually use to make the grooves for stringing wrapped in blue tape. I made these from a dull Dispoz-a-blade from our 24″ Wadkins Planer)

Cutting Scarf

To glue the stringing in, I used a sharp stick to get the glue deep into the routed groove and then pressed in the stringing. After the glue set up for about fifteen minutes, I used a burnishing tool to press the stringing further into the groove.

Gluing in the Stringing

After the glue set up completely, I simply used a chisel to pare off the piece of veneer that is sticking out of the top.

Paring Stringing

When making the cut like this with a chisel, I usually turn the chisel over to keep it from acting like a ramp and diving into the work. I also had to move slowly and pay careful attention to the grain direction to keep the stringing from splitting out of the top.

Corner Detail

The corner detail was a little more difficult, but with careful layout, setup of the straight edge and routing I was able to create the grooves for the corners.

Routing Corner Detail

After cleaning up the corner with a chisel, I was ready to inlay the stringing.

Before Cleaning Up The Corner

Each corner needed to be mitered, so I used a 45˚ chisel block to make the cuts.

Using Chisel Block

Miter Cut

Here is what it looked like after the corners were cut before I pared it down to the surface.

Mitered Corner Before Paring

After all the stringing was pared down I cleaned up the top with some careful scraping to get it ready for finish. Here is the top with the stringing completed.

Finished Product