Sunday, August 6, 2017

Commission work

A guy at work is having his engagement party in a couple weeks and he approached me to come up with some ideas for a present he wanted to give his fiancĂ©e. So he had a couple of ideas I create some patterns then once he saw them he had some other ideas I combined them with some parts of what I had already had done and this is the one he liked


Now I decided to use my last piece of purpleheart. It is really the only thing I have other than pine or poplar both of these are 3/4" while my purpleheart is 1/4". It does matter the thicness. I can plane down the thicker wood but it is still just common wood. So with that said and looking at what I created for the hands?

I was in a rush when creating this and did not look at it overall for weaknesses just for possible floaters. Well, some of those look rather fragile and I figured I better test cut this on something to see what issues I will be facing. Sometimes when you design stuff you can actually design a very fragile pattern that can be really hard to cut. This is one of them! So the first test cut many things broke while trying to cut the hands. Which let me know what I needed to cut first and which side needed to be cut. The next one went better but still, I made poor choices on the cuts. So the third cut was better but still problematic. So with no choice left I put the pattern on the purpleheart and cut all the surrounding cuts first since I did not want to break anything on the hand while spinning the piece to make all those cuts.

I did not break anything on the hands!

But I'll tell you those hands are one continuous cut from start to finish. and that is not what I did. I broke that cut into sections rather than do it all in one run. That way I only had to hang onto one fragile piece at a time. I almost think this was harder to do than the Bully was. Well, here it is without a finish on it yet. I'll work on that over the week. I think I am going to use gel satin finish on this to make the purpleheart pop.

I only used a Flying Dutchmen #3 Scroll Reverse blade this made the cleanups on the fuzzies on the back just a small job. Unlink the bully which took me hours to get the fuzzies off since I was using a spiral that was not a scroll reverse.

What is a scroll reverse blade? Glad you asked. Normal blades cut on the down stroke as the blade exits the wood it leaves little tiny wood fibers that look like fuzzies. A scroll reverse blade has some teeth towards the bottom of the blade that point in the opposite direction and cut on the up stroke. So as the blades come back up those teeth cut the fuzzies off. The eliminates 90-95% if not more of the fuzzies. A huge time saver when you are cleaning up the cuts when you are done.



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