Splicing Mother of Pearl for a CNC Engraved Truss Rod Cover

It has become more difficult to find large pieces of mother of pearl recently. Discussions with Duke of Pearl led me to try something different. There are some laminates out there that would work for my application but I really don’t like the look of the multiple splices that usually show up in laminate pieces. I decided to try splicing mother of pearl myself to make CNC engraving blanks of the needed size.

I’ve done solid one-piece mother of pearl truss rod covers in the past that turned out really well and I attempted to do the same thing but the mother of pearl that was available was bright white which really didn’t match my new (to me) 1930’s Gibson Style 11 banjo. Here is a photo of this with an awesome piece of mother of pearl sourced from Duke of Pearl.

I have tried edge-gluing mother of pearl in the past and found that it didn’t have much strength at the joint so I decided to try a lap-joint to get more strength. I still don’t really like the look of the splice so I decided to try something different and “lean in to an issue and make it ‘worse’ so it becomes art” – Jason B. Instead of trying to hide the joint, I make it into a curve and left a 10mil gap and glued it with black CA glue. Here is the final result:

I first made a small vacuum chuck to hold the mother of pearl – this isn’t really necessary but I enjoyed making it. I used a 1″ o-ring as a seal. Arguably, it doesn’t really have enough holding force but it seems fine for this application since I’m not taking big cuts on mother of pearl anyway.

Then I machined the curve / shelf and checked the fit. It was then glued together with black CA glue. A laser-cut template was used to position the “art feature” and set the CNC zero to the proper location. I then continued my normal process and filled it with red mica + CA for the red and black CA for the black inlay.