Fixing a cracked bowl with a bowtie inlay

Halfway through turning a bowl on the lathe, I spotted a split in the wood. The classic way to fix cracked wood is a bowtie inlay (or butterfly key): a decorative inlay that spans the crack, locks it together and stops it spreading. It looked like the perfect chance to try something I'd been wondering about for a while. Could my laser engraver cut the bowtie and engrave the recess for it, doing the whole job that's normally done with chisels?

Trying to cut the bowtie with a laser

I've inlaid wood with a laser before, but this was different. The bowtie had to be functionally strong, not just decorative, so it needed to be cut from a dense hardwood offcut.

The laser really struggled. I expected a hardwood to take several passes, so I used a fast speed with multiple passes to avoid scorching, and it still nearly caught fire. I thinned the blank with a hand plane (remember that detail) and tried again, adjusted the laser height for better focus, and got even more burning. I planed it thinner still, and the laser still couldn't cut through this mystery hardwood.

Cutting a bowtie inlay by hand

At that point I had a choice: keep fighting the machine or pick up the chisels. I went with the simplest solution and made my first ever bowtie by hand, so if I've missed something obvious, I'd love to hear it.

Hand-cutting added its own challenge, because I was fitting a flat inlay into a curved surface. I couldn't mark out the full shape straight away and had to work in passes, re-marking as I went. I left the bowl in the lathe chuck throughout, since my chuck's independent jaws make it almost impossible to re-centre a piece once it's removed. Much of the recess was cleaned out with a tiny 3 mm chisel. The bowtie went in with a good dollop of glue and a clamp overnight. The next day I trimmed the excess with a pull saw and finished the bowl on the lathe.

The finish, and what I learned

As always with two contrasting species, the magic happened when the finish went on and the bowtie really stood out against the bowl.

The lesson? Woodworking, like any craft, isn't about perfection or avoiding mistakes; it's about problem solving. That's hard when you're a perfectionist who hates getting things wrong, but sometimes the best solution is the simplest one, even if it isn't the one you planned.