Inlayed vent covers

So in my upstairs bedrooms I have cold and hot air return vents. I put in the hot air return vents when I got air conditioning a few years ago. What you do is you cover the hot air return vent in winter and cover the cold air return in summer. Up until now I’ve used these flat magnets that you can find at your local BORG. The problem is, they’ve all started to curl and are barely staying up.

So I thought, hey, I can embed some rare earth magnets in some wood and have a nice solid vent cover. Then I thought, hey I’ve been meaning to try my hand at freehand inlays.

So off I went to Adobe Illustrator and to my scroll saw. I bought a few pieces of 1/8” cherry, walnut and maple and used some scrap boards I had laying around for the covers.

I used Marc’s (the wood whisperer) method for doing the inlay. http://thewoodwhisperer.com/inlay-pictorial/

I made one for each room . . . one for my son’s nursery, the Penn State Nittany Lion, a boxer, and the last one is the symbol for my favorite band Dream Theater. I pretty much gave up on that last one. It was too hard . . . too many small pieces and tight angles. I ended up breaking all sorts of things trying to get it to fit. So I just hammered it in, made up some epoxy/sawdust mix and filled in all the holes.

All in all, I like how they turned out. It was good practice. I had a couple big oopses on the first two. The last one was a mess, but the boxer turned out pretty good. I found it was easier to hide mistakes with the walnut base. I also found that I didn’t really need a 1/16” bit. I used a 1/8” bit for all of these.

So that’s what kept me out of trouble for the holidays. Just a couple scrap boards, a few magnets and a couple of bucks worth of 1/8” wood. Fun!

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