Wooden Sign - Routed, Carved and Burned
A friend from work is an avid biker and the group he rides with does a lot of charity work for different children's shelters. One of these shelters is the White Mountain Apache Tribe shelter here in Arizona. He asked a couple of months ago if I could possibly donate some time to make them a sign to replace their laminated construction paper one.
This sign is what I came up with and I used it as an opportunity to try a new technique which of course required a new router and bit. You can watch the entire process here:
Check out the video for a quick view of the entire process. I had 2.5 hours of video that I got crammed down into about 7 minutes. I thought I was doing good taking less video of each process until I loaded it all into my editing software and it came up to hours worth..
Before plunging the spiral upcut bit into the Alder I got ready for the sign, I decided to practice a little on my monkey that has been laying around the shop for a couple of years. This monkey head was practice for another technique when I was getting ready to burn it into my corn hole boards.
Everything you see on the table is what was required to make the sign. I didn't really end up using the Dremel on the sign but did use it on the monkey quite a bit.
I used the same carbon copy paper transfer technique as both of my full and half scale corn hole boards.
The use of a face mask and safety glasses were pretty much a requirement due to the amount of saw dust and wood chips that went flying everywhere. If you watch the video you'll see piles of it around. At one point I had a pile 4 or 5 inches deep in my lap.
After everything was routed, chiseled and sanded down I burned the letters in and painted the border.
Lessons Learned
- Practicing new techniques on non "production" objects is a must! If I didn't do the monkey first I would have probably cut off the last letter of the sign and wasted all of the material and hours of time.
- When routing out things with mass amounts of material to remove, it would be nice to have different sized router bits. I used a 1/4 bit for this entire sign and would have done well to get a 3 or more bit set. That way I could have gotten into tighter corners with a small bit and removed more of the blank material with a larger bit.
- I think it's time to get a better work bench. While using my scrapers and hand planes, that little table moved all over. I can't tell you how much easier it would be if things didn't move when you tried to plane them!