Sunday, March 27, 2016

"Bring Us Your Ideas"

"Bring us your ideas" is a bit of a tagline that we have used at the vendor shows that we have been a part of.

Well, at our last show - earlier this month - someone did just that!

We were approached by a man who had a project underway and he was looking for some help.  He said he had taken an old phone and was making it into a Bluetooth music player, as a going away gift.  Things had gone a bit off the rails and he was wondering if we could help.

Later that day, he brought his project over.


Originally he had asked about us doing a cover or modification to the wooden face plate that he had, but in the end he decided to have us make a new plate altogether.  He gave us a drawing of how he wanted the finished piece to look.

Jeff set to work with a micrometer and AutoCAD.  We cut a few test pieces out of paper, until the placement was just right.

Then the requested images and text were added and this is what it looked like.


The lettering was a bit hard to read in certain lighting situations.  This is a problem we've had with this wood/stain combination.  So I decided to try a technique I'd read about, but not yet tried: color fill.

The process was fairly easy, but very time consuming and tedious!  However, I think it was worth it.


A comparison of our first plate, alongside the color-filled one.


The customer came to pick up the finished job last night and he loved it!  This was certainly a first, in a lot of ways: our first fabricated from scratch custom ordered piece and the first time doing color fill.

I see a lot of color fill in my future.  It adds several steps and quite a bit of time to the finished product, but the results are certainly worth it!


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