Greetings from my workshop to yours! This project was fun for a number of reasons. First, it pushed me down a couple of new paths. The wood is locally sourced walnut which was severely warped, quite possibly from the unique grain in it. It was dry but rough cut when I got it a few years ago. Stayed reasonably flat till after I planed it down about a year ago. Then it cupped and I was unsure what to do with it. I watched a @IDCWoodcraft video about flattening via surfacing. Honestly, I just use my 80 year old surface planer for flattening, but this piece of walnut would have been paper thin and still been warped. While I didn’t have a GOOD surfacing bit, the concept still worked. I had some burning, but it was indeed flat! I used painters tape and ca glue to hold the slab in place, another first for me. I returned to my planer and flattened out the second side. Once that was good, I took a thin pass to clean up the burns from the lack of a good surfacing bit. A bit of quick random orbital sanding and I was ready for a couple coats of water based polyurethane. Then onto machining. I did my design in vcarve pro. The logo was provided in a jpeg that wasn’t super high resolution. I went online and converted it to a png file, which got rid of the jagged lines in the design.
Carving wise, I used a 60 degree v bit from @IDCWoodcraft which worked very well. Settings were Feed rate: 60 inches per minute; Plunge rate: 20 inches per minute, 20,000 RPM router speed. It produced a very clean carve. The front took approximately 23 minutes to carve. It is 14.5”x10.5”x .625”
Next I painted the words and design with acrylic craft paint. The colors are copied from a coffee cup I received for being the guest moderator last month. Once dried, a quick sand with 120 and 220 grit with my random orbital sander and I was ready for more spray poly. I did need to use a short bristle brush wet with water to get some of the fine dust from the letters before spraying.
The one thing I didn’t do (but should have pushed myself) was do two sided carving. I included a saying by Ben Franklin, my business logo and a keyhole on the back. I used 2 separate files for the back, one for logo and saying, and one for the keyhole.
I am fortunate to have an entrepreneur group that meets weekly over coffee. This plaque is for the moderator who has been doing this since 2015. The group wanted to show their appreciation for her efforts. I was fortunate enough to do the piece for her.
Anyhow, if you read to the bottom of this long post, the butler did it! No, actually I did it and was very pleased with the outcome of this project. While this project may seem basic to some of the amazing makers here, I was quite happy with the performance of my MK2.
Jake
