I was inspired by the inlay on Dan Caouette's "Nereida". The process is similar but my work is nowhere near the difficulty or quality of his.

I created the design in OmniGraffle on a Mac. Hardest part was settling on a theme for the boat. My wife grew up in south Georgia and has a decent sized arrowhead collection left over from the Creek Indians that used to inhabit that area. She's also one quarter Irish. So I came up with the idea of an abstract arrow going through a Celtic heart. I checked the symbolism with my Irish boss (she's from Cork). She said I'm good as long as the point of the heart points toward my wife to indicate that her heart is already taken. That was good advice. I almost built her a giant floating billboard that says "hey, I'm available!"

Separated and rotated all the 20 individual parts so they were aligned to the grain and would fit on a 3" x 24" piece of 1/16" basswood from the local Hobby Lobby.

Covered the basswood with blue painters tape. Sprayed it with contact adhesive. Attached the pattern. Cut out the parts with an Exacto knife. Not so bad since most of the parts have straight edges and the wood is so thin. Use double stick tape to attach the pieces to the boat and get them aligned correctly. Most articles/videos recommend using turner's tape. I found it way too thick. I use small rolls of Scotch double sided tape from Walmart. The tape is plenty strong and the pieces are thin enough that the wood will bend to conform to the curved shape of the boat.

Slowly and careful trace the entire pattern with an Exacto knife several times. This is one of the hardest steps. Its easy to catch the grain on the boat and cut away from the pattern or find that you're cutting into the pattern piece. Then lightly trace the entire pattern with a 0.5mm mechanical pencil. Without the pencil tracing its very difficult to see the score lines when the pattern is removed.

Before the heart can be inlayed I had to inlay a strip of Spanish Cedar to interrupt the Basswood arrow.

I use a router base for a Dremel and a 1/8" bit, which I got from lutherie supply shop, Stewart-Macdonald (http://www.stewmac.com).

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Tools/Special_tools_for_Routing/Precision_Router_Bases/Precision_Router_Base.html?actn=100101&xst=1&xsr=0358
http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Tools/Routing_bits/Carbide_Downcut_Inlay_Router_Bits.html

I use a lighted OptiVISOR, also from Stewart-Macdonald. I typically use this over my existing 1.75 readers.

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Tools/Special_tools_for_Inspection/OptiVISOR_Headband_Magnifier.html

It's noisy and creates a lot of fine dust. If you can imagine I'm wearing a respirator, OptiVISOR, and hearing protection. Quite a sight. Fortunately I don't have a pic.

I've taped a dust collector port from a Bosch router to help keep the dust down.

While I was routing out the recesses for the Basswood pieces, some of the Spanish Cedar that I had previously inlayed would pop loose. It was just glued it with regular Tightbond. I'm suspect that since the routed surface was not very smooth it didn't get good adhesion. TB doesn't fill gaps very well.

When I went to gluing the Basswood pieces, I used a medium CA glue in the recess and spray accelerant on the back of the piece. Worked much better and was able to just hold each piece in place for 2-3 seconds while the CA glue setup. Really sped up the process. I also used a 1/2" chisel as a scraper to smooth all the recesses before gluing.

After almost gluing my finger to the boat and gluing my thumb and finger together once, I switched to wearing gloves. I only managed to glue the glove to the boat once but was able to sand that off easily enough.

It's definitely not perfect but it passes inspection at 5 feet away. I'm toying with the idea of inlaying another design on the stern hatch cover. Maybe a Celtic knot shamrock.

Apologies for the long post. Hopefully that's helpful/interesting for someone. More photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/91958255@N04/sets/72157635543653071/

Greg