Dan Sawatzky’s Blog

For the second critter sign I chose the apothecary store. This is what they called drug stores in the olden days. In the wild west some unsavory druggists sold ‘snake oil’ – a cure for whatever ailed you.

We finally finished enough large pieces to remove them from the shop to make the way clear to take out our broken screw compressor. I loaded it into the truck and took it into the neighboring town for repair. They called me a few days later saying it was as good as new. I picked it up and plugged it in

The great news is that we finally moved the five large features out of our shop two days ago. That meant I could finally get the old compressor out to take it to the repair shop for a rebuild. It arrived back today and that means we can soon get back to routing the long list of backlogged projects once more. Today, however was far too busy for any routing

The Happy Horse Saloon has a false front with and arched top. The round sign will be attached inside the round portion in-between the two light boxes.  The back of the Happy Horse Saloon sign wasn’t much harder although it was critical that everything was done in a particular order to get the results I was looking for. I started with those  same vectors

The next sign in the long series for the Cultus Lake project is for the Happy Horse Saloon. I’ll be posting it in two separate posts. It is to be round, layered and feature a fully dimensional cartoon horse head. The head will be hand sculpted. I created the basic vectors for the sign in Illustrator and then imported them into  EnRoute .

The giant cactus with the vulture has been sitting in our driveway for quite some time, patiently waiting for the time to deliver. Today was finally the day. Now imagine the fun of strapping this piece upright onto the trailer (so it doesn’t get damaged) and then driving down the road.  As you can imagine I got plenty of second (and third) looks, lots of friendly waves, huge smiles and thumbs up at every turn. The installation was flawless as per usual

The next sign to be built for the Cultus Lake Adventure Park is the Summit Trading post.  Since we elevated the ground by eight feet and the trading post in on top of the hill (and inside the mountain) SUMMIT was the perfect name. It will feature a small copy of the mountain peak.

Last week, with the arrival of unseasonably warm weather, we spent the bulk of our time up at the worksite. We are making great progress on the welding and meshing of the many armatures for the sculpted concrete. The front half of the park are largely complete.