I used to deal with company in the US that sells knife making stuff and was recently thinking how some of it could be used in guitar making.
I have some dyed burl maple going onto a handle atm and am going to use the left overs from the block to make some fret board dots, same with mosaic pin material. Cutting the brass into thin enough slices is the difficult bit.
Shame the plastics realy need to be contoured to bring out their patterns but would be good on knobs

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http://usaknifemaker.com/knife-handl...-hardware.html