It’s been a very busy month of almost non-stop travel for me, with most of the trips to Trinidad as we wrap up the Skallywag Bay Adventure Park. It’s looking very cool these days. I’ll be posting some photos of that project next week on my return. This week we are attending the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions EXPO in Orlando, Florida. The trade show is massive with over 1000 vendors and 40,000 attendees from around the world.
With Christmas fast approaching it’s a great time to do up some name plaques for those you love. They make great presents and you can practice your painting and glazing techniques at the same time. I’ll show three name plaques in this post – all different colours to better demonstrate our techniques. The first is Elsie’s name plaque. We started by painting it an off white colour
Janis loves chickens but there are no roosters allowed. (they tend to crow early in the morning and wake her up!) I believed we needed a rooster somewhere on the property and so I designed a fun fellow to perch on top of a sign Janis had been asking for in our yard to warn visitors to slow down as they passed through the the shop. As with all of our projects we would use a variety of mediums and methods to build it. The sign portion was done on our MultiCam of course, routed from there layers of 30 lb Precision Board.
I often get asked to talk about a ‘typical sign’ and how we build them. The answer is most signs we build aren’t typical. But they do follow a pattern.
I find it a great deal of fun to design rather complex designs and then figure out a way to fabricate what I have imagined. We are currently working on a good sized theme project called the Cloud Buster. It is a drop tower ride.
The wind up key mount was the first accessory relief to be created for the tank. I started with a flat relief 0.2″ tall. The rivets were the next modification by using the dome tool.
The next part of the tank we are building is the main turret. It is pretty simple but it uses tools in ways not often done. The turret is built in two pieces – an upper and a lower half. The first step is the create a relief using the bevel tool, but we’ll do it with a twist. That is to use the limit to height tool which effectively flattens the top with a nice bevel around the edge.
When I was in Salt Lake City at the EnRoute Summit I was asked to tell the story of how and why I chose a MultiCam CNC router. This is a video of that story…
I find it a lot of fun to build rather complex files in EnRoute. They are both challenging and a great way to learn the functions of the software. Once mastered the functions of ADD, SUBTRACT, MERGE HIGHEST, MERGE LOWEST and REPLACE allows us to build some pretty interesting shapes to create just about anything we can imagine.