It is always a fun adventure to deliver one of our projects. In this case the journey was short – only 400 feet up the road. We first carefully dragged the sign out from under the shelter of the porch. Then we hooked up a chain and lifted the moose from the attachment point we had built in from the start.

It was placed on my low flatbed trailer. We decided not to use the extended forks and so loaded it on the tail of the trailer making it a rather unbalanced load. With the short distance we were to travel it wasn’t a big deal.

We decided to put the forks on the bobcat and use it to balanced the trailer. Slow and easy was the order of the day. We arrived onsite without incident. My clients were all smiles!

My client had his big excavator onsite to do the unloading duties.

He gently lifted the moose from the trailer and swung it into position.

I unhooked the chain, unscrewed the eyebolt and turned in the cherry to complete the sign.

As quick as that the sign was installed. The client drilled in some anchor bolts, raked the gravel up to the sign base and tidied up the area in readiness of the crowds that would shortly arrive to watch the Yarrow Days parade. 

Ice cream anyone?

-dan

With the installation of the moose happening early tomorrow morning we simply had to finish it tonight. Generally I like to finish well before deadlines but this has been an incredibly crazy week. We worked until just before 10 pm tonight to get the last of the paint on the mighty moose. Because it was too tall to finish inside the shop we completed it under the outside porch. High humidity and steady rain made the paint dry extra slow. ten high powered fans aimed at the moose took care of that problem in a hurry!

It was too dark to take final pictures but I grabbed this one as we did the second to last glaze on the moose. Final glazes and the painting of the lettering came after this. 

Yarrow gets a new landmark tomorrow morning early. 🙂

-dan

Today was the day to put a skin on the mighty  moose sign which we routed the a double sided sign for a while back. We mixed a special fiberglass reinforced concrete to trowel on about an inch thick. We then let it set up to a certain point.

Then we carved in the final form, the fur, eyes and other entails. Peter (above) works on sculpting the waffle cone while Brando carves in the moose’s fur.

Here’s the moose at quitting time, soon reedy for paint. Stay tuned…

-dan

The Mighty Moose Ice Cream sign needed to be assembled. The sign would be comprised of five layers. One layer of the sign would be cut around the steel framework. I clamped the second layer of the sign to the frame and marked out the area.

I used the layout on the back of the sign to create the small pieces I needed, cut from scraps of Precision Board high density urethane. 

Then the four layers of routed Precision Board were glued up around along with the small scraps I had cut to fit around the welded steel frame. Everything will be allowed to dry well before I use the die grinder to even things up and add the wood grain to the edges of the sign. Now we can weld up the framework for the ice-cream cone.

Stay tuned for more…

-dan

The Mighty Moose sign is to be a double sided sign. The owner asked that it be old weathered wood, which suits the theme perfectly. First up we created the lettering. I added an outline around the letters in EnRoute using the offset drawing tool.

I then drew a rough broken board using a bitmap of the driftwood from the TEXTURE MAGIC collection. I created a flat relief and then used the bitmap to add some woodgrain. 

Then I selected the virtual sculpting tool. I would use it to carve into the ends of the wood background. to give the wood a lot more character,

I sized the lettering to fit on the background I sized the lettering for the l=panel and then created a duplicate of the background. I flipped it to create the back piece of the sign. I then duplicated the lettering and positioned it on the second copy.

The outline of the letters was created as flat reliefs. I positioned the reliefs vertically on relation to the woodgrain and then merged highest to the wood background.

The MIGHTY MOOSE letters was created using the bevel tool. The bevelled lettering was created with a 0.2″ vertical base.

The letters of ice cream were created with a slight rounded top.

With that the files were ready for tool patching and routing.

Stay tuned as I route and glue them up on top of the moose.

-dan