Thread: How Hard Is Mother Of Pearl?

I have some MOP coming to try my first attempt at an inlay and I have never messed with MOP before and don't know how hard it is. What I am wondering is if I take the scales to a higher grit would I have to use a lower grit to sand down the inlay or is it soft enough to use higher grits fairly quick. I just don't want to do all the work sanding the scales just to have to go back down in grits to work back up. I was hoping I could just almost finish the scales and then set the inlay and then work from higher grits to finish. I think I am just excited since this will be my first attempt at an inlay plus the scales are the first horn scales I have made from scratch and not just restoring old ones so I am rather impatient on wanting to see the final results.

The Mop is much harder than horn. carve out your recess and fashion your inlay. keep setting it in there, removing and sanding until it is as close as possible before setting it permanently. Then careful sanding to blend. Polish the whole thing. It might be better to sand the horn down a bit to the pearl than vice-versa!

Ok well looks like I will just have to wait then. I guess though that is better than getting excited and trying to hurry and end up messing up the scales. Especially since the horn slab has been sitting around for awhile now and if I mess it up now I would have to wait for more horn. Thanks for the info.

2.5-4.5 on the mohs scale..according to this website.

Mother-of-Pearl

Thanks if those numbers are right then its is somewhere in between silver and steel. Hopefully it is like copper which is in the middle of those. Either way it is going to be fun I think.

When inlaying a hard material like pearl (and with metal into wood, too), you are probably better off to take a fine file and level the pearl with that as much as possible, rather than sand. If you just sand, the softer surrounding wood will be lowered disproportionally faster than the pearl, and the pearl will never get quite down to wood level unless you're very careful, use a hard block for backup, and touch wood as little as possible. A neatly used file will do a nice job, and shouldn't need much subsequent sanding.

I highly recommend one of these: STEWMAC.COM : Fret Dressing Stick
Very handy for this as well as for many uses!

Why would you post that dressing stick cause now I have all sorts of ideas of what I could do with it . I have a hard enough time trying to keep my mind on one thing at a time. lol Thanks for the link. I think I will have to order one of those now.

Sharptonn was merely feeding the tool acquisition disorder that is a risk you take by entering into this segment of the forum.

Use a sharp new tool if you can. Doing things by hand is much safer as errors happen much slower than by using machine tools. There are some cautions about breathing MOP dust. However, this article: http://www.portercalls.com/images/so...DIEarticle.pdf

is quite good at balancing that discussion. Enjoy.

Fret stick ??? Okay if I buy one of these, THEN can I say I have 1 of everything ? I may need 2 :<0)
I have not done inlays of any kind yet but was thinking the basic would be to inlay low and sand down to them. If you get too low ( inject some impatient actions here) you could always shim up somehow with glue or paper even ?