When you finish gluing in the inlay how do you set it up for clearing out the excess inlay that sticks up. What settings are you using?
You can use the cnc but do not go all the way down to the surface of the female pocket material. Finish up by sanding. You can use a planner but that is quite violent and if the inlay is not very long it will not feed through most planners. You can use a drum sander if you have one. I have a Jet 16-32 drum sander with 150 Grit paper and it works quite well on inlays and epoxy. I never sand all the way to the surface I just leave a skim coat and finish up with a 5" random orbit sander for better control.
You can use a bandsaw to cut off a good part of the inlay and finish up with sanding. The bandsaw works as long as your project is not too big to fit in your bandsaw.
There are a lot of ways to get the male plug cut off just be careful and do not be too aggressive.
I mentioned the planner above but I have pulled out parts of an inlay on my Dewalt planner so I dont recommend a planner. Good old fashioned elbow grease is the best method unfortunately.
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I might have about .250 of excess on top so sanding would take a while. I have seen them do it on YouTube with a surfacing bit but they never show the settings. I don’t know if you zero everything out then start above the surface that excess, they go below the surface .01. Or something like that.
So my surfacing bit is a 1" Whiteside 6210. I only take 0.010" at a time when tramming. You can take more but I want to take the least amount I can. As I said earlier do not go all the way down to the surface. If you do you can wind up with a little pocket and then have to surface the whole project. The more below the surface you remove of your inlay the more distorted it can become. So leave a few thousands of the inlay and sand that off. You have more control with the sander than by surfacing. You are less likely to make a mistake with the sander. You dont want all your hard work wasted by making a simple but costly mistake. So you can use a surfacing bit or even just a 1/4" bit to surface off your male inlay plug. Use the standard F&S and depth of cuts. Just make the pocket less than the total plug is above the material.
So z zero on top of the inlay and measure the distance you want to pocket down very very carefully. Then create a rectangle just a little bit larger than the male inlay and create a pocket tool path starting on top of material and going down .20" if you have .25" sticking up above the surface of the project material below.
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