Welcome Sign

This project sort of moved past the area of woodworking more into the area of crafts.  I hope I don't lose any man-points by doing this!  But I wanted to try a couple of different things and this helped me to do it.  First of all I got more practice on the scroll saw cutting out the sign.  The outside edge wasn't too bad and cutting out the letters on the inside actually came out better than I expected.  I have been cutting some small items on 1/4 inch birch.  I found that this 3/4 inch pine was much easier to cut.  I think the added thickness of the wood gives better control and you don't seem to stray out of the lines as quickly.

After cutting out the sign I just painted it white with some while acrylic craft paint.  Then from the back side I tried to paint the inside edges of the letters with black.  I got most of the depth from the back and then moved to the front to try and finish it.  I was using a crappy brush that had bristles springing out all over the place so I ended up getting a lot of black on the front of the sign.  After it dried I sanded down the black spots and went over those areas again with white.  I think it turned out OK.

I decided to make the sign seasonal and since St. Patrick's Day is coming up, I googled shamrocks and found lots of images.  I printed out copies in two different sizes and cut them out. They are both cut from Birch plywood.  The two smaller ones I actually cut at the same time from two pieces of birch stacked on top.  I just used clear packing tape the secure them together.  It was interesting that in cutting a stacked object like that, it really pointed out that my table and blade are not at a perfect 90 degree angle.  I thought I was pretty close but this showed how it wasn't.  I did some adjustments to the table after I cut this and it is pretty good now.

I had bought white, black, and green paint at Hobby Lobby.  The dark green one is the green paint I bought.  I then mixed the green with a little white and painted the other.  I also painted the large shamrock the dark green.  I then rummaged through my wife's scrapbook paper and found a perfect piece of shamrock paper.  I used the same pattern to cut out the paper and glued it to the shamrock.  I used Mod Podge to glue it down.  I then used a matte spray sealer to coat the whole thing a couple of times.  I tried to spray from several different sides so I could be sure and get the sides and inside the letters.

Finally I just used some small velco circles to stick the shamrocks on the board and stuck a piece of craft wire in it so I could hang it on the door.  I am in the process of making some Easter eggs that are about the same size as the shamrocks and once St. Patrick's Day is over I will take off the shamrocks and stick on the Easter Eggs.  Attaching them with velco makes this quick.  Although I am not sure what comes after Easter Eggs so when Easter is over I don't know what I will put on there!

Flying Dutchman blades

All the experts in the YouTube videos seem to really like Flying Dutchman blades. Everyone also says you need to get the scroll reverse blades so that you get a nice smooth bottom to your project. I ordered a few dozen of these blades in a couple of different sizes to give them a try.

When I bought my scroll saw it came with a dozen #5 Olson skip tooth blades. These are the ones I have been using up to this point. So I put in a Flying Dutchman (FD) #5 scroll reverse blade and started cutting a Christmas Ornament pattern. There were a few things I noticed right away.

First of all it was very difficult to tell which way the teeth went on the FD. On the Olson blades it was easy to run your finger down the blade and tell which direction the teeth were going. On the FD it felt the same going both ways. I had to use a magnifying glass to try and determine which direction they were going. The teeth don't seem to obviously point up or down. They sort of just point out. I had to look for the subtle change on the last few reverse teeth to pick out the top and bottom. Maybe this is good and that is why they are preferred but it was real hard to figure out which way to put it in.  See the pictures below for a comparison of the two blades.

Next, they seemed much more brittle than the Olson blades. I had only broken one blade up to now and I broke three FD blades on one little ornament. I don't think I was doing anything different so I was disappointed that they seemed to break so easily.

The last thing I noticed was that it was much more difficult to cut a straight line. They say that blades will always pull to one side so you have to actually go at the blade from a bit of an angle to get a straight cut. That angle was much greater with the FD blade than with the Olson blade. I guess this is something you get used to after time but it seemed much harder to get it going in a straight line and then keeping it on that line.

I will use these blades some more, especially since I bought 6 dozen of them, but after some more practice I will use the Olson blades again and see if I still prefer them. Should be an interesting exercise. I don't want to discredit some product because of my lack of skill but I want to make sure I am using the product that works best for me.

This is roughly how the blades look with the naked eye.  The Olson blade on the left has obvious teeth and you can see they are pointing down.  The Flying Dutchman blade on the right is difficult to see.

I used my camera's zoom to get this picture.  Again the Olson teeth on the left are more pronounced.  The Flying Dutchman teeth on the right are much smaller.  From the top of the picture you can see the FD teeth change direction between the 3rd and 4th teeth.

Reducing a Pattern

In my first post, How It All Started, I mentioned that the justification for getting a scroll saw was to make some small words/letters for my wife.  Now that I have my saw I had to figure out how to make smaller letters.

I used a process I learned way back in Junior High art class.  I got a large piece of poster board and traced around each letter.  Then I marked off the poster board in 1 inch squares.

Then I used graph paper that was marked out at 5 squares per inch.  I decided to reduce it to 60% of original so I used a 3x3 square on the graph paper to equal 1 square on the poster board.  I then just went square by square and drew on the graph paper square what was on the poster board square.  I used a different piece of paper for each letter so I can photocopy each page and make the letter.  The letter J is pretty big, 21 inches tall in the original, so it ended up fitting on legal size paper instead of letter size.

And this is what I ended up with!  If you are wondering about the edges, I just used a rotary tool with a sanding drum to hit the edges and make the little indentations.  I still have to figure out how I am going to paint this.  But now my wife is happy and I can make her as many of these as she wants.  Also, like I mentioned before this was made with 1 inch pine.  (Which is really 3/4 inch!)