I am going live with the shop in about a month or two, so I’ve started to dress up the old garage. It is a great way to display some of the skills to the outside world, and it gives a few projects that stay around to test some outdoor preservation stuff on.
It is forbidden in my town to have big ass displays hanging around advertising a shop, so I keep it a bit subliminal.
First off, the road sign shows off simple v-carve capability—coloring lettering and laquer finishing. Subliminal advertising for my shop is part of the process.
Second: the flag. In America, it’s customary to have a flag or more hanging around. Where I live, it’s seldon done. I, however, like the idea, and it gives me the opportunity to display and test out some different paints in harsh conditions.
Third: a clock. My latest addition is a clock in watch style on a teak plaque. It’s great wood to mill precise slottings; it’s durable and looks fantastic.
I found a cheap wall clock. It had a glass dome, and that gave me the right components to design my own shop clock. I’ve only bee-waxed the wood to see how it holds up out there with only minimal protection.
Love dressing up your shop! At first glance, I thought you remade the sign from MASH, my favorite TV show ever! Nice way to experiment with finishes outdoors.
I cannot think of a better use for those pallets. You have some font searching sessions ahead of you, or some serious bitmap traces ahead of you, it seems. Would love to see this pallet wood fan-project of yours come together though.
I used the wood of some cheap ass wooden tiles I found at a local Ikea clone. It’s second grade acasia wood, not the best to carve but when painting lettering is the goal, that is not a big issue.
I still have a “watch the ̶D̶o̶g̶ Chicken” sign I need to put up. It’s more of a test on painting over a laser-etching than on carving. I might count that as a shop display too.
Thanks Michael, that’s a huge compliment for it was the goal I set for that small project. I am aiming to combine artistic paint techniques with carving and laser etchings. I’ve added just a tid of shading over the primal colors of the sign. It’s amazing how easy it is to transform a clear carving into something that needs a second glance.
I know the feeling. A good year ago the misses came with the idea to start a chicken asilum, if I pleasepleaseplease would build her a pen. I agreed cause it gave me a project to run larger materials over the long mill. I didn’t think much about what is was for. So I locked the miter saw and used the cnc to it’s max and beyond.
Now there are 30+ chickens living in it. They are picked up from egg farmers a day before they would end up in a kfc bucket. I can tell you, those animals don’t look like much when they arive but they tend to touch the soal when touching soil for the first time. Even mine.
Excellent @Spamming_Eddie ! Thanks for sharing your project! Your looks like a castle compared to my design. My father in law helped me build this before I had back surgery last summer. We have 12 ladies that I adore! Almost nightly, I will pull up a lawn chair and let them free range for an hour or two. They are funny, all have a personality and most like their head and comb rubbed. Ours love black sun flower seeds and watermelon. In the fall they will get apples that have fallen from the tree and chase each other even though there are enough so everyone could have their own.
Now my bride wants pigmie goats. We have a friend who is a police officer that raises them and she keeps offering to bring us a few to “try out”. I keep saying no, but that will only go so far.
I should stop now, cause this is a CNC forum. Don’t want to get in trouble. Here is my coop and run. We placed it on a concrete slab that was existing and use hay for the floor. Don’t need to worry about predators digging and getting in.
Now I’ve finally figured out why my machine didn’t work well on long jobs (faulty USB) due to freezups during laser etchings. I can finally move on and work on some larger pieces. Yesterday, I did a final long duration test on a Raptor etch. It ran for 3.5 hours without hickups, so I’m quite confident that from now on I’ll have a lot fewer remaskings to do during etchings. Giving me the time to work on coloring while etching the next project.
I am a -use what you got before going to the hardware store- kinda guy. It’s a pretty sterdy way of clamping and you can even elevate a piece that isn’t flat at the bottom to kinda level with you machine.
It has limitations too but for these sortha round slabs, it’s a way to free up your piece from clamps to be able to flatten it in one run. I see it as an alternative for glueing up your piece to the machine bed.
You can even mark the wood buffers between the clamps and be able to re-zero on these if you need to remove the project from the machine for whatever reason.
Nice painting skills! I think it adds a lot to your pieces. Funny how that raptor is below the surface and looks like it until the paint job. After the paint it looks raised up to me.
Thanks for the compliment. When I was working on it, I felt I was messing it up untill I stepped back a few feet and the raptor jumped at me.
The raising of the picture is called the crater-dome illusion. You can make something that is at a lower position, pop up by darkening one crater rim oposit to the expected lighting direction. The obscured rim makes you see the pocket invert towards you.
The newest shop-dress-up addition is the mighty Spitfire. A painted laser etch with an inlay propellor sticking out to try and enhance the 3D illusion. Not my best work, for the slab was pretty beat up and the paintjob aint all that good, but this is my largest project combining carving with lasering, and it took only a day to get from the idea to completing the CNC part, so not at all bad.
Last week, I went to the chamber of commerce and enlisted my shop. I still need a nice sign on my garage that will indicate that I am not only in the market for woodwork but also for electronics projects, and that both skills can combine pretty well.
So, I designed a simple but catchy sign that will lighten up the shop door.
The first full test after the initial lay-out of a few -many- LED strips and even more stupendously many glass fibers has been done.
I think it’s going flashy.
Next, I will install another set of strips for an overall ambient backlight. The flashy part will only work when there’s sound, in the hope of catching the eye of chatty people walking past the shop.
