Inlays 1

I want to make bat shaped inlays for the fretboard. And I want them to be all different, and made of mother of pearl. That's hard it turns out. mother of pearl is expensive and really fragile to cut. I need 12 inlays in total to do a 24 fret neck. I can get away with 10 if I skip the 24th fret.

I found some mother of pearl (pieces of polished oyster shells) on ebay and it came in about a week and a half.  There weren't very flat and there weren't very white.

I traced the fret board and drew out the inlays.

I cut the paper inlays out and glued them to the backs of the mother of pearl.

After a miserable attempt to cut them with the scroll saw I switched to this set up. That's the pearl clamped between two pieces of wood and a manual coping saw. It's slow going and they crack easily in the vice. It's the least worst way I've come up with to cut them so far. They're way too small to hold onto while cutting them anyway. 

I got 4 cut out that are usable so far. I ruined 4 in the process. When this is finished I'll need to carve holes in the fret board to match these exactly. I think that'll be even harder. This might have been an ambitious design....