I have been watching this guy on youtube recently called Jigsaw Nation. He makes a lot of cool big signs out of plywood. Mostly car stuff, video games, and whatnot. I got inspired and decided to make a pair of NASA logos for my dad and I for Father’s day.

The jigsaw dude I follow projects onto the plywood and traces his designs out. I wanted to produce two of the same thing, so I opted to print a template and route instead. The AS was too big to print, so I cut it up into two parts with an alignment stitch between them. I doubled up the plywood and used my bandsaw to remove most of the waste. These letters are around 6 inches tall.

I went to the router table and ran into an issue. My pattern bit only has about an inch of cutting depth. Oops. I’ll have to split these up and do one set at a time.

I wanted these to look really clean and crisp, so I proceeded to use filler to make the edges solid and smooth. I tried mixing up goodfillas, plasticwood, and bondo spot filler. They each are kind of OK I guess. I didn’t end up taking pictures of that process because… can I still use the dad brain excuse? Same excuse for the background. It is a 2ft wide piece of plywood with the edges rounded and filled. For paint I did a number of coats of primer/filler to get it all as smooth as possible with sanding in between where needed.

I still need to work on my spray painting skills. I think I get going too thick and it leaves little puckers and attracts dust. When I go super light though I don’t see the gloss I want. Practice I suppose. To get the kerning right I printed the space between the N and A, and another between the S and A.

Once the glue was try I was all set. Dad was visiting at mother’s day and already has his hung up outside his rocket building control room. Mine is up high in my shop where the paint imperfections are hard to see!