Popular Post Coyote Jim Posted March 13, 2018 Popular Post Report Share Posted March 13, 2018 It was a Saturday and my brother's family and my family were going to have dinner with my parents to celebrate my Mom's birthday. We had gotten Mom normal grandma/mom gifts and everything was set to go but early in the morning I had an idea to make my Mom something all last minute like. It was a simple idea. Get a piece of wood. Put something super cheesy on it (my Mom LOVES cheesy, I think her whole generation does). Wrap it. Then presto! Tear educing gift! We googled "Quotes for Grandma" and saw one that was perfect. You see, my Mom often watches my kids and my brother's kids and over the years the cousins have gotten pretty close because of it. So the cheesy thing we landed on was "Grandmas House: Where cousins become friends." It was perfect. At my day job I have a designer that works for me. I called her, told her what I was doing and she was down to help. She asked me what I wanted it to look like and I told her "Make it look like Pinterest threw up on it!" She knew exactly what that meant and went to work. While she was doing that I picked out a piece of wood. I picked this: This board is birch that I got off a pallet. With the board in its rough state like it was I could not tell for sure but it looked like it had some very nice spalting. This particular pallet was VERY stubborn and as you can see I broke this board trying to get it off the the pallet. Still plenty of usable wood here though. The board is 8" wide and there was about 12" in the middle that did not have major cracks. I ran that 12" piece through the planer a few time and in doing so I found another crack that I did not know about. After planing, the crack was big enough that I was able to just break it with my bare hands. You can kind of see the crack in the picture above on the left side. That was fine, I was able to glue it back together pretty flawlessly. Here it is in the clamps being glued back together, and now after it has been planed you can really see all the spalting. While waiting for the glue to dry I checked back and my designer had sent me a couple of options. I went with this one: I'd say she pretty much nailed the look I was going for. After revealing the nice spalting and now seeing this design I was getting pretty excited. Also at my day job I have a laser engraver, and it's a doozy. This is an industrial grade work horse of a laser engraver and I absolutely love playing with it. Normally all we use it for is boring stuff for customers but occasional we get the chance to do exciting creative stuff. Not that the stuff for customers is not exciting, that stuff is what pays the bills, it just that with that stuff we do not get to flex our creative muscles. I fired her up and started shooting fire. Here is a short clip of it working in real time. It took about 12 minutes. I actually did it in 2 passes because after one pass the engraving was not quite as deep as I wanted it. Also, I put a mask on it because the smoke that is created will get on the wood and will then have to be cleaned off (you can see the dark discoloration around the letters) and if I mask it the the smoke gets on the mask and I can just peal off the mask. Also, I did not know how birch looks when lasered, some wood does not turn dark like this, some wood stays a very light color and I wanted to be able to paint just the letters if this had turned out to be too light. Luckily birch is nice and dark when you hit it with a laser. This video is in slow-mo. The smoke is kind of mesmerizing. As some of you may remember I asked on these forums the day I did all this for a recommendation on what kind of finish to use on this sign that will dry/cure fast and I was told to use a spray shellac. So that is what I did and it worked perfectly. Later that night at dinner I did get the tears I was looking for. So I will count that as a win. This is not a project that could be considered "Fine" woodworking, I did not show off any incredible skills or techniques or anything (unless you count my designer whipping together that cheesy design in only a few minutes). But it was a fun one. Also, this is a fantastic gift idea. You can call around to your local sign companies and see if any of them have a laser. If you provide the wood all ready to go they will most likely give you a pretty good deal on just lasering it for you. Depending on the company they may have a minimum order so find out what that is and do enough to make it worth it. If they have a minimum of $50 then doing one small sign would not be worth it. But if you could do 5 signs for $50 then that is a pretty good deal. Anyway, thanks for reading. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pkinneb Posted March 13, 2018 Report Share Posted March 13, 2018 You got tears FWW or not that's a major win! Nice job Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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