The Bully Cuts Are Done!

The scroll saw work is now done. 1048 individual cuts. That means 1048 holes drilled and the blade inserted 1048 times. This took a whole lot longer than it should have. But then again I was unable to cut for about 5 months last year. Then it was winter which prevents me from cutting since I use just a simple unheated shed for a shop.

So now I need to make a frame for it before it is really completed. Also, apply a finish and I need to make sure the fuzzies on the back side are not there. Since I am entering this into the NC State Fair for 2017 I will have to be extra vigilant about those fuzzies. Attention to detail is everything when you enter into a contest to judge the quality of your work.

I will also need to decide on a color for the back. I am thinking about using felt either gray or reddish clay in color? I am leaning towards reddish if I can find it.

Thanks for looking!

More Bully

So I've done more cutting on the bully. Maybe another weekend or two and it will be done! It has been a long road. I have this fear that after all this work is done that this plywood is going to have chip outs under the paper. 

When this is done I would have made a total of 1,048 cuts. Wow, that means I have drilled 1,048 holes then inserted the scroll saw blade over 1,048 times. I say over because there are times when the blade slips out of the blade holder and then I have to put in another blade.

All that adds up to a ton of time spent cutting this thing.

Update on the Bully

Yes, I have been cutting this off and on for over a year. So it was supposed to be last years State Fair entry but my bicycle crash put that idea on hold and I entered another project into it. It has taken me a while to get fully comfortable at the saw and now I will be working this project till it is done. Hopefully, I'll not make any major mistakes. This has quite a few internal cuts. On the really small ones it takes longer to feed the blade through the hole then it does to cut it! It looks to be just shy of 50% done. So I still have a bit of time left. Then the removal of the fuzzies from the back will take a bunch of time to do also as the spiral blades leave more fuzzies behind then the Ultra Scroll Reverse I use for non-portrait cuts. But the spirals let you in any direction and you don't have to spin it.

I find this patterns very hard to follow and the reason is that the pattern is black and so is the blade. So the blade get's lost at times in the pattern and drives me crazy. On this one I tried to change some of the pattern to gray but that does not fully work since it is a picture and not a vector graphic. It is probably my biggest gripe with pattern designers.

So maybe someday I'll go down the path of designing my own portraits so I can make them the way I would find easier to cut for myself.

Thanks for looking!

Multilayered Dragon (Wyvern) Final

Okay so I have now glued it all up. I am happy with how it turned out. There are things that I would be more careful with doing if I were to ever do another but I probably will not do another as how many of these do I need? I added a hanger and it was slightly tricky since it has such a long tail which throws off the center of balance for this. Which makes it hang to the side  So I had to find the center of this thing before putting the hanger on the back. With such thin woods I am unable to screw or nail this so I epoxied the hanger onto it. I like the angle it hangs at.

Anyway here is the final picture of the Dragon (Really a Wyvern) I had a hard time trying to get a picture of it. The size of it kept me from really getting a good picture of it with my camera. But I do like the color of the wood. No stains this is all natural wood. It is Purpleheart (Purple), Satin (Yellowish), and Walnut (Dark Brown). The white backer is just Baltic Birch Plywood It is 4 layers on the end of the tail. This is my first attempt at choosing wood based on its natural color. I used my go to finishing of choice Danish Oil I love this stuff. It brings out the color without all the worry of runs as it is an oil with the varnish in it and it soaks into the wood and hardens the wood and brigs out the colors. It is a satin finish as it does not make it shinny. I debated on how to finish it.  But since this needed to be glued up and has so many places that would make it hard to use any other type of finish. I do not like spray finishes as I always seem to mess them up.

Hanging on the wall

The epoxied Hanger

Outside trying to get good lighting

Now I need to go and complete the Bully Elephant I started over a year ago. I started that one before the bicycle crash and that is what stopped me. But that is a fret work one with over 1,000 cuts to it and it is time consuming. I can spend a couple of hours cutting and it just seems that nothing gets done since I spend so much time putting the blade into the holes since there are so many tiny cuts in that one.

Here is that link but I have not put out any updates out since this post last year. I might have maybe 1/3 of this one done. I'll put another update out on this one soon.

Bully