Cutting Veneer with a drag knife

[drueth]

Drag Knife

Has any one else tried to use the Donek drag knife. Since I have had my Shark Pro HD two areas that I have had a great deal of intrest in are doing inlays and also being able to cut veneer. After sitting on the fence I was finally able to buy the Donek drag knife. With the latest issue of Aspire or VCarve you know have a gadget to creat the required tool path for the drag knife. To hold the verneer flat I needed a vacuum table. So here is my fist try at making a $20.00 vacuum table and also working with the drag knife. Just another idea to add to all the other great ideas I already have seen on this site. The cross slates are about 0.25" above the bottom so the vacuum can be pulled from each square. I made this box out of 3/4 pine. Feel I would make the next one out of 1/2 poplar and drill severial 1" hole in all the pices to alow the air to move around. I was able to use my shop vac to pull the vacuum to hold the veneer flat and to keep the cut out pice from jumping under the blade after it was cut out.

[tonydude]

That looks really good. I see you had fun with it.

Tony

[hdtheater]

The Doneck is my next 'want to buy' item. Nice work!

-Eric

[rsetina]

I didn't know this could be done until seeing this post. I'll have to purchase one of these in the future. Would it be possible to cut veneer that could be used as an inlay after cutting a pocket?

[drueth]

Rsetina

If you want to do an inlay in solid wood I would do it this way. http://www.vectric.com/support/training ... inlay.html The one thing I would point out that may not be clear in the vidio is the start depth and cut depth are added to gether. I have not tried to do a veneer inlay into solid wood. I have only started to lean how the drag knife works. The two things that you need is some form of vacuum box to hold the veneer down and it must be "coplanar" to your gantry. You are making a cut that is only .025" deep and I have it set to make 3 or 4 passes to make that cut.