Shop update #81 (5-15-19)
Between family events and Mother’s Day, very little woodworking was done this weekend.
On Saturday morning, my older son and I were at Chino Hills High School with his Boy Scout Troop, helping with the Let It Be Foundation 5K charity run. I got a call from the lady that ordered 2 Wood Badge plaques a couple of months ago. She is making a totem for her Wood Badge class and the guy with the laser engraver just cancelled on her and she wanted to see if I could help her out. I have made other totem signs before so once I saw what she needed I agreed to make it.
Once we got home, I added some braces to the back of the Adirondack chair, did a little digitizing of the totem, and then went to a communion party for a friend’s daughters at 3:00.
After the party we went to our local drive in to see Avengers Endgame with another Cub Scout family. While we were out the lady dropped off the piece of wood that she wanted me to use for the totem. It was sourced from the location that does the Wood Badge training and the finished totem will hang there.
Sunday was Mother’s Day so my son decided to make a last minute gift for my wife. He used the free Easel software on the Inventables website and designed a wooden sign for her. We then carved it out in less than 10 minutes. He took it to the painting station (kid sized picnic table) and filled it in with color. We let that dry out in the sun for a couple of hours and then he sanded off the excess paint. After wrapping it we all presented our gifts in the late afternoon before making her dinner.
That night around 10:00 pm I was able to work on the totem. The 12″ x 12″ x 1 1/2″ board is rough sawn and I wanted to keep that look so I gave it a light sanding to clean up the worst of it. I then carved the totem into the board using my X-Carve CNC machine and the free Easel software on their website.
Once I cleaned up the carve, I filled up one of my little needle squeeze bottles with black acrylic paint and filled it in. I still had some metallic blue left in another bottle so I gave the eyes a little color too.
It was midnight by the time I was finished so I called it a night.
I stopped by Home Depot on the way home Monday night and picked up some water based spar urethane. The entire block got 2 coats on Monday night, 2 hours between coats with no extra sanding.
I let that dry outside all day and then gave it one more heavy coat Tuesday night making sure to fill in all the cracks and crevasses. The Spar Urethane goes on white and then dries clear. The lady then stopped by and picked it up about an hour later.
