The Love Tester

Test your love appeal....and secure your work.

Knowing how to do marquetry, especially when you’re used to doing it pretty much every day, can be a blessing and a curse.

The blessing part is obvious — it’s a great way to add a little embellishment and ornamentation to a project. But once you realize that you can make pretty much any image using marquetry and that it really can be applied anywhere, you want to, well, apply it everywhere. At least that’s my experience.

Last week I detailed the ins and outs of the bench I’m currently building, including the vises. One of them — the HNT Gordon tail vise — is installed in a 3-wall mortise at the end of the bench top. The mortise is cut from the top, which means after it is installed, a faceplate is necessary to cover everything up and have it work properly.

The instructions say to just mill up some material and screw it down, but I absolutely couldn’t pass up this chance for marquetry. And because of the way the vise works, there was ample opportunity to have whatever image I made interact with it.

When I went over my bench build, I mentioned that after a lot of discussion, my wife and I landed on making the faceplate an old timey “Love Meter.” The thought was that as the dog for the vise advances from right to left, it could pass into different “zones” on the “meter.”

Here’s what I sketched up, leaning heavily on actual designs from mid-century U.S.

This was an ambitious project. Looking at that drawing, it’s clear there are over 100 individual pieces in there, most of which are letters. Letters (and words more specifically) can be particularly challenging because no matter how you arrange things, you’ll always end up in a short grain situation. Those can easily turn into disaster, especially when the work is done on a very small scale.

Make no mistake— I had a lot of failures in this project. More than I’m used to, if I’m being honest. But I know that when I’m about to start something like this I am absolutely going to have failures. Things that I think will work out during planning will be impossible to do in practice, so I have to stay on my toes and be willing to adapt.

And after a lot of work and some redos along the way, I came up with something I think is pretty dang neat.

There’s a lot going on here, and if you haven’t done a ton of marquetry, you’re probably wondering how a lot of it was done. In reality, this one was no harder or easier than any other piece l’ve made. It just required a bit more planning and thought to execute.

Let’s dig in.