I had this simple inlay for a full height back splash and wanted to share the steps I took to achieve a pretty nice looking Palm Tree Inlay. The customer had this design and she wanted to add it to her kitchen design. We digitized the shape, fixed it up on the CAD program and added the tooling and tool path.
We were then ready to go.
I bought some Transparent Flowing Acrylic ( I think it was acrylic but not positive) two-part adhesive from my local stone shop. After pouring the amount I thought would be enough, I mixed the color the customer chose. I made the color opaque because I didn't want to have any chance of seeing through the fill into the material.
Before adding the hardener, I cut the pattern with the CNC. The depth is 1/4" and the inside of all the shapes are engraved with a 45 degree bevel bit. The engraving function and bevel bit make the corners of the shapes, nice and sharp with tight corners.
After the design was thoroughly cleaned, I used the hot glue gun and made a perimeter dam around the entire object, making sure there were no gaps.
Next step was to add the hardener and mix well without adding a lot of air bubbles to the mix. Bubbles in the fill will cause major problems when finished sanded so be careful with this step.
After adding the hardener I poured about 7/8 of the fill into a Snapple Jar. The lid had a 1/4" hole drilled into it to allow for a flexible hose to be attached. I then attached the hose to a vacuum that would allow me to suck the air our of the liquid fill. Be sure to hurry along with this process. Spend too much time and the fill will harden right before your eyes. I learned this real quick on the first attempt.
Only thing left to do is fill-er up. Fill it enough to allow for shrinkage. We don't want that. This will leave the fill lower than the surface of the material. Put too much though and it creates a lot of work to sand down and make flat.
Different fills dry at different rates. It is extremely important that you allow the fill to dry completely. Working the fill to soon with the sanders will cause the material to expand and then shrink down into the material causing a low spot. Some use a ski router and route the material flush. This works great on smaller designs, but large, wide designs won't allow most skis to pass over it.
If you can't route it level, use a grinder to take off the majority of the fill. Then mover to a FESTOOL of Belt sander and sand flat. DO NOT OVER HEAT. Take your time and work is slow, especially if you have wide areas of fill.
This process worked pretty well. I would have liked to use a better filler material, but this is what I had and it is very inexpensive. There are other manufacturers that make liquid filler specifically for our industry so maybe some of you could post some links to those websites.
Final Results:
