I have been trying to make spray paint stencils with my swivel cutter for a while.  It isn’t going well.  Not sure if there are tricks to clean cutting, or if my setup needs improvement.  Probably both.  Instead I decided to go a different direction and use hardboard (sometimes called masonite) to mill spray stencils instead.  It is cheap, mills well, except for a bit of fuzz at the edges, and holds flat against the spray surface.

Our bees are doing well and they look really healthy.  They are kicking so much butt, in fact, that the hive deserves some decorations.  How about a nice “NO MITES!” sign.  For anyone not familiar with mites and bees, look up varroa mites if you dare.  They are horrible creatures that parasite honey bees.

I ran into a few small stencil problems.  To do the NO cross out, I had to break up the spray job.  You mill out the areas for the paint to go through, and there would be two floating half circles if I did that.  Instead I milled most of the shape, but left some edging to hold it all together.

I thought this was a great solution!  Spray the mite down, spray part of the circle, then just rotate, line everything up, and spray again.  Apparently the cross portion isn’t symmetric.  I must have eye balled it in the software.  When you rotate, not everything lined up perfectly, sooooo I kind of fudged it.

When you stand back a bit, everything looks pretty good, but I need to work more on my spray technique.  Lets just say I didn’t exactly do a lot of vandalism in my youth.  Does that banksy guy offer classes?  At least the mite turned out reasonably well.