Once the gears and the background of the sign received multiple coats of paint it was a simple matter of drilling the center of the gears and then gluing them in place using some short dowels to center them. Then I popped the lid on using a little epoxy to hold everything securely in place. Once the glue had dried I used the die grinder to even out the edges and add a teeny bit of texture to the top as well. Then I brushed on two coats of silver to finish things off nicely. The sign measures about fourteen inches across and so will fit nicely in a suitcase for its trip to Hawaii in January. Sadly, it will be traveling in my daughter’s suitcase as  I won’t be going along on this trip.

It’s not very often we paint our signs in pieces and then assemble afterwards. Most often, especially for outdoor projects I like to route in as few pieces as possible and then securely glue and fasten together before the painting process began.

In this case the piece will be displayed indoors. Compared to most pieces we build this one is fragile. The only way to realistically paint it was to do the bulk of it separately and then assemble before finishing the outside surfaces. As each piece came off the MultiCam today I did a little finishing handwork and then test fit everything. Then all of the inside surfaces got their first coat of paint.

 My good fiend calls his studio the Imaginarium. I wanted to make him a sign that had some resemblance to a skeleton watch but simpler. The design had some limitations as the finished piece had to travel inside a suitcase. My friend lives in Hawaii.

I first did a quick scribble in my sketchbook to work out the basic idea. It was very rough but it gave me a chance to thoroughly work out the design before I started on the computer. The original work was done in Illustrator and these vectors were imported into EnRoute.

 I find EnRoute is the easiest tool to use to finalize shapes and work out the radii of the intersecting corners. Once I had things pretty much worked out I separated the pieces like the gears which would be routed as separate pieces.

The gears in fact would be the first reliefs I created – all as simple flat reliefs with raised and sunken portions plus different thicknesses to the two types of gears.

Once the bear and shaft reliefs were built I merged them all to a zero height relief. They would be routed as one file with a thin onion skin background so they didn’t fly off the table as I routed them. Some of the gears were very small and all had little surface area for the vacuum table to grab.

The face of the piece was next. I first created a flat relief .

The flat relief was then modified using the dome tool and the outside circle vector.

I decided to create a zero height relief with that same circle vector and then merged the top face of the piece to it.

The last step was to create the lettering as an embossing.

The back of the piece was to be woodgrain. It was as simple as creating a flat relief and then adding a woodgrain bitmap texture. In this shot you can see how much I stretched things out.

The supports for the two styles of gears were done at two heights. These were done as individual reliefs and then merged highest with the wood grained background.