While the grain filler experiment dried I thought I'd have a go at replacing the plastic dot inlays with some black mother of pearl. Originally, I thought the plastic dots were drawn on but I was quickly educated (by you guys in the mod forum) that they are indeed plastic. The graining I could see was sanding marks. Anyway, it was too late, the MOP dots were ordered and when they arrived they looked so nice against the maple, I could not resist trying to put them in.
This was a scary thought. The only place I had plastic dots to practice on was in the neck - so in otherwords - there was no practice - I just had to get on with it. After a lot of YouTubing and listening to the advice in the mods thread I took the plunge.
My process:
First drill a 2mm hole in the plastic dot.
Then drive a largish screw into the hole.
Using a cloth to gently but firmly wiggle the screw until the plastic started to crack. Sometimes after a twist the dot would come out cleanly. But most of the time it would come out in chunks. Often I had to re-drive the screw and wiggle some more. Eventually around half of the plastic came out and that was enough to use the end of the screw to pick at the remaining pieces.
The trick is not to use the edge of the hole to lever out the pieces - perhaps that's obvious - anyway I managed to forget that on the last hole and slightly marred the board with screw thread. I used some maple saw dust and super glue to fix that.
Now I had a nice clean hole.
Then it was just a case of flooding the bottom of hole with super glue. I used the nozzle of the glue bottle to ensure the glue coated the sides of the hole. But the MOP dots were a nice tight fit. I used a small length of dowel and a hammer to tap them in so they were just proud of the surface.
To make the dots flush I followed the steps in the Pitbull vid. Starting with a flat needle file to remove most of the meat and then P320, P400 and P600 sandpaper until they were flush and shiny.
I'm really pleased with how this turned out - it could have been a disaster, but I think all the advice I received in the other thread and the YT vids really made it quite straight forward. Like most things - not rushing and taking plenty of time is the key.
One thing you can see in the vid - either my crappo sandpaper or the MOP dust has made the grain in the maple quite dirty. I've tried cleaning the board with a first a damp cloth, then some tack cloth followed by white spirit - but nothing seems to shift it very well. I also tried some P600 sandpaper and that helped a little but not perfect. If anyone has some ideas on how to get this out, I'd be grateful!
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