I rarely get to weld an entire armature for a project, but occasionally I have that privilege. With everyone else busy on all the diverse projects on the go and the shop crammed full to the max, there was just enough room for me to squeeze into one small area by the big shop doors. This project is vertical and doesn’t take up much floor square footage. It is the ‘Aunt Kelsey’s Apple Tree Swing’ sign for Vala’s Pumpkin Patch in Nebraska. In record time, I designed and routed the sign faces on our new ShopSabre CNC router. This machine is much faster than our old one! I then glued them up over a sturdy welded steel armature. Then, we cut the 1/4” thick steel base on the FastCut CNC plasma. I raided the scrap bin for the structural steel as the apple tree trunk needed to be twisty and gnarly, and we save our short bits for projects like this. Then, it was on to forming and welding up the pencil rod framework. Tomorrow morning, Matt will start attaching the diamond lath in readiness for the sculpting process, which may be started later this week. Stay tuned…
Final glaze
We are making great progress on the NEB’s Fun World project. The wall panels are being regularly sculpted, with two of the last four underway. We’ll be down to the final two panels by week's end. The single sign for the project, Rita’s Reading Room, is also underway. We routed the dimensional book and built the plasma-cut steel bracket some time ago and have been gradually adding coats of paint as we found time. This past week, Kendra applied the final glaze to make the sign ready to roll out with the finished panels, which are mounted to the same frame. The gold leaf lettering will be done just before we ship the pieces to Ontario later this spring. Stay tuned for more instalments…
One more section sculpted
On Friday, the sculpting crew carved out the brickwork on the last base section of the NEB’s Fun World. Paintwork will begin on Monday. Before that happens, it is time to do the full shop shuffle once again. We’ll first pull the three giant frames full of wall sections out of the shop. After a quick cleaning, we’ll move in three frames with wall sections, including this and the partially painted sections. There are four panels on two frames left to sculpt. It is all coming together pretty quickly. Stay tuned…
