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!
