Ed said...
> An “inlay” may be easier than you think.  If you cut the walnut to size,
then cut a small rabbet all the way around, you could glue in a mitered
strip of wood like a tiny picture frame, plane or scrape it even with the
edges/ends and top of the walnut, then treat it like one piece of wood.
What about a thin strip of maple and walnut with the walnutstrip against
the maple and the maplestrip against the walnut?  Now you have not added a
color or texture.  Something like .05-.07" each combining to make .1-.15”
(total about 1/16”).

Duh - I never thought of that...I was envisioning routing a groove after
glue up. This may actually be a very doable idea...thank you. Whereas my
way would have required power tools or a 71 and a lot of stress ending with
a substandard result.

and I may have to tune my scrapers up.... but that's an awful lot of
scraping whereas I could just pass the maple to the modern woodworkers as
contract work and get it back into my galoot shop for hand tool follow up