Shop update #41 (8-8-18) – How to make a routed and framed Family Name Sign

Saturday was another busy family day.  I had to have the older boy at Ayayla Park, which is about 20 minutes from my house, at 7:00 am for his Boy Scout Troop to help out with the Relay For Life cancer fundraiser event.  I helped to man a booth until 12:00 pm and then headed home. 

After a quick lunch, I headed to Home Depot to pick up eyelets for the Stanford Family sign.  They only had chrome and bronze so I painted some of them black to match the sign.

Once they were painted I headed to our local park for the Special Needs Game Day hosted by my younger son’s Cub Scout Pack.  I helped setup some of the games and then literally cooked a thousand hot dogs for the kids.

I left there around 6:30 pm, cleaned up, and headed over to a friend’s house for poker night.  I got home around 1:30 am to find that somebody had TP’ed our house.  My wife is on the PTA for the younger boy’s Elementary school and the older boy’s Middle school so we are guessing that it was related to them.  I did end the night $27 ahead from playing poker so I consider it a win.

The younger boy and I were up bright and early at 7:30 on Sunday morning to go pick the older boy up from camping at the fundraiser event.  We got back from breaking down the camp and returning the camping supplies to the scout house around 10:30 am.  I then started on a sign for a friend.  He is going to give it as a gift at a wedding on Saturday.  He had asked me to make it about 2 1/2 weeks ago and I may or may not have forgotten about it.

I have a vinyl cutter that uses a 15″ transfer tape so I decided to give that a try on the sign to see if it would make it easier to paint.  It did not.  The initial pass on the X-Carve CNC machine cut through the transfer tape but each additional pass only made it curl up around the edges and make it ultimately unusable.

I went ahead an peeled it all off and gave the sign a sealer coat of spray polyurethane.

I let the poly dry for about an hour and then gave it a coat of black spray paint.

I let the paint dry out in the 100 degree sunlight for 3 hours and then sanded off the black and gave it a couple more coats of spray poly.

While the poly was drying I went to Home Depot and picked up some 1 1/4″ pine molding.  I cut it down to 4 over sized pieces, sanded them, and gave them a coat of the same black spray paint as the sign.

Monday morning I set all the pieces on the outdoor workbench before I left for work so that they could bake in the sun all afternoon.  That night, after work, I gave the sign a light sanding with some 220 grit sandpaper and glued and brad nailed on the over sized side frame pieces and the top frame piece.  I then used a flush trim bit to cut the side pieces to length and glued and nailed the bottom frame piece.  I let it dry for an hour and then trimmed the top and bottom pieces to size.  I used a sharpie to paint the 2 cut ends that were left showing.

Tuesday morning I took the completed sign outside again and gave it one more coat of a satin spray on poly and let it bake in the sun all day.

My friend will be picking it up tonight, Wednesday, for the wedding on Saturday.