DesignFind

Wood inlay of a butterfly using Black Walnut, African Padauk, Yellow Heart, and Wenge. The inlay surface is 1/8” thick and glued to a backer board. The finished piece has a rubbed oil finish.

Created using xTool D1 Pro and Lightburn the inlay fit is very tight.  Lightburn’s “Offset” function is used to compensate for the laser kerf.

Laser cutting time is approximately 20 minutes, assembly time approximately 2 hours.

This How-to shows you how to make a wood inlay using the xTool  D1 Pro 20 watt laser. There are several options for creating wood inlays with the xTool lasers. You can use the laser to engrave a pocket for the wood and then cut the inlay pieces and place them in the engraved pocket. Or as I’m showing here you can “cut” an outline of the inlay, cut pieces to fit together in the outline, and then glue the whole piece to a substrate (backer board). The substrate can be plywood or solid wood. I’m using black walnut for the top piece and the substrate.  This method is "faster" than the the engraved pocket since the laser only has to cut the outline of all the pieces.

The file of the inlay can be created in a variety of different programs including Lightburn, Visio, Inkscape, or any program that will output SVG files. I did this with a piece of clipart from vecteezy.com and then modified it to create this cut file. Each section of the cut file needs to be a “closed Vector”, so it does take some time to prepare. After creating the cut file for Lightburn the cutting the assembly is easy and like making a puzzle.