I finally got around to trying out a recon stone inlay (I bought the stone from www.masecraftsupply.com/). I inlaid a brook trout/fly motif into an ebony fingerboard that I had around.
In comparing stone to shell, I would say that they both have their plusses & minuses. I found that the stone is a bit more brittle than I expected. Some of the advantages of the stone are that you can get it in fairly thick sections (I used 1/8") and that it is much cheaper than shell.
I did all the cutting on my CNC (I'm using a K2 machine). All the drawing & programming was done using Rhino & Rhino CAM.I made the inlay smaller than the cavity by .0025 per side and only had to do minimal fitting in order to fit everything up. If you look close you can see the white edges to the fins...some of those are very small - they get down to about .010" wide.
Here's the whole thing - the fly is at the 3rd fret and the trout's head is at the 12th fret:
a closer view of the trout..
and a closer view of the fly at the 3rd fret
