Pearl engraving

[Manuel Bonilla Beya guitars]

I’m by no means an expert on engraving but I’ve done (as “not-so-bad”as I could) it a few times on pearl (not on guitars but for martial arts wooden swords) and I’ve found it easy to loose thinnest lines and details when leveling and preparing for polishing, so I do it on the final stages of work.

On the other hand, I know nothing about CNC and I guess the rules and results could not be the same.

[Jonathan Stewart JM Stewart Guitars]

The cnc is just sort of a separate ask I suppose.

So your saying you do most of your work

Before inlay, then inlay and level, and redo some of the finer lines and engraving that’s lost in the process?

[Manuel Bonilla Beya guitars]

It would be nice to have someone one who is more used to engravings to help us here (that’s something I don’t do often enough to really get any expertise on) but on bent surfaces as a fingerboard I would do all the engraving after inlaying and leveling so I wouldn’t need to do things twice (as it happened indeed on my early works) but that could be just a matter of lack of experience and the proper engravers have their ways of doing it before without suffering any losses.

You can find nice videos of artisans cutting and engraving shells for fingerboards, but they are just flat pieces, and for sure some of the lines will disappear when inlaying on any radiused one. And of course the recess should be at least equal to the inlay piece thickness so you needn’t to sand away any shell, but what will happen as you get closer to the sides?

On the other hand, I’ve heard of people diving thin shells down to the bottom of the cavity well below the surface and then filling up with transparent resin (so they can use really thin sheets) Guess it works well but don’t know how it looks after all.