Hummingbird Silhouette bench

Neat! CNC?

-- Custom Daguerreotypes from your images and more: www.shinyphotos.com

wow thats beautiful. i’m not sure whether i like is painted of not, i think that it looks great either way. thanks for the post!

Very nice. How did you do the carving?

-- Bruce from Central New York

This is done with a router then painted in black. I can’t paint that good so I always have to get out the belt sander when it dries.

-- The Kings Treasures

I prefer the painted version, some questions for you if you don’t mind

What paint do you use? (that doesn’t bleed beyond where you want it to be.)
Do you seal the wood first before you paint?
Do you seal the finished job after painting?

Thanks

-- Colin, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. "Every craftsman was once an amateur"

Hi, thanks for the nice comments. I just use a water based paint, craft paint I guess, durable for outside. I have not had a problem with the paint wanting to bleed except when I use the belt sander on it after it dries. The heat softens the paint and the belt wants to spread it a little. I just started doing the finishing sanding with a Jitterbug or orbital sander. The fixed the bleeding but I have to work a little harder to get the paint off. Sometimes I seal it after I am done. I have used Thompson’s water seal and sometimes I use a polyurthane varnish.

-- The Kings Treasures

I really like this project and would like to start something like it. I guess I am wondering if someone could tell me how thick to cut the boards so they will not cup. Is that cedar?

-- www.robneves.com

You do some real nice work. How long do you spend on the router detail?

-- Ron, Twain Harte, Ca. Portable on site Sawmill Service http://westcoastlands.net/Sawmill.html http://westcoastlands.net/SawBucks2/phpBB3 http://www.portablesawmill.biz/concrete/

The router detail is the most time consuming part of the project but it doesn’t take all that long. I can do a pretty decent sign in an hour or less. I did one today on the back of a bench that took me about an hour to rout mostly because I had to keep going over it carefully to try and straighten some of the wiggly lines that were supposed to be straight. I will post that project in a couple days. Then I made one that I finished in less then 30 minutes. It was a project for myself, a Flea Market sign on a stump, so I was not so picky about how it turned out. I will be posting that in a couple days also. I like doing the larger projects better, they are easier to get right or to fix my mistakes. I have done some so small that if I just messed up one letter I would have had to start over. What really makes me mad is when I get a project done and then notice that I misspelled a word! That has happened before.

-- The Kings Treasures