With the lath in place it was time for a little concrete work. I mixed up the sand and Portland cent at a ratio of about four parts sand to one part cement powder. Then I troweled it onto the mesh. This takes some practice. I've been doing it for decades so this part went pretty fast.
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.
To create the cab of the little boat I first created two zero height reliefs. I opted to create meshes and then merge them to the relief, rather than modify the reliefs with the revolve tool. Either procedure would have worked in this case. I generally use this method as it allows me more freedom to adjust the height of things before locking it down by merging it with the relief. The mesh shows red when selected, green when not.
It's been a busy week as I headed south from the EnRoute Summit in Salt Lake City rather than heading home. In Trinidad the work on Skallywag Bay Adventure Park is continuing, with the permanent placement of the features now beginning on a large scale. It is ratifying to be doing that job after almost four years since the project began in earnest. I was in Trinidad for four days this time and great progress was made.
I built this little fishing boart quite some time ago but decided to revisit it when I was recently teaching a workshop. It's a complex but not too difficult a build which is fascinating. The first time I built these reliefs I was pretty new to EnRoute and the MultiCam. That gave me an appreciation for the feelings I knew my students would have.
