Tag Archives: Jigsaw

Nuka Cola Sign

Posted on by
Reply

I have been a fan of the Fallout video game series for a good 20 years, since I first played the original game. Sometimes called Diesel Punk, imagine a retro-futuristic world imagined in the 1950s. Everything is nuclear powdered, sleek ray guns, cute suburban homes with tv dinners and a cold war that went hot. The game has a lot of back story and atmosphere including a soda brand called Nuka Cola that looks a lot like coke.

I am also a fan of this funny Russian guy that makes signs with lots of skill and few tools. He did a few different fallout based signs, so I had to follow his lead and make my own Nuka Cola sign. His methodology is simple. Project onto a piece of plywood with a cheap projector, trace, carve those lines in with a dremel so you can see them after you paint, then paint the various layers. I still managed to mess up a little. First up, the projection.

I found a rough text/logo of what I wanted and used inkscape to make the offset for the sign outline. I hand traced it and moved on to cutting the outline. It took a little special sanding to get it all straight and clean, but I was happy with the shape.

Next came the carving and a bit of an issue. The plywood I used was pretty light and I had trouble seeing how deep I was carving. I started with a small pointy burr, and moved to a much larger, too large, ball carver. Later when I painted it all, everywhere I touched was obvious, and the deeper cuts were obviously too much. Next time I might prime with a neutral color before starting the projection. It will make the pencil line standout better, and make the dremel lines more obvious.

With it painted, the base red coat it might be a bit more obvious how uneven some of the carving is. The jigsaw guy mostly back sprays with black to form a border. I did that too, but the complex shape in a few spots means I will have to go back and do it again after putting all the red down.

With the base of red down, you fill in the letters with white. I went for house paint and did 3 coats. It built up more texture than I wanted, a good quality craft paint might have been better. In the end it didn’t matter that much. The biggest issues was my wobbly carve lines that were too big in places. It kept my edges from being very crisp. It is hard to paint to a clean line when the guide is over an 1/8″ wide. A weathering trick he uses sometimes is to hit the finished product with a wire brush on a drill. Genius, it looks great.

  • Painting finished
  • Wire brush weathered

Overall I am really happy with the project, but I need to work on my dremel carving technique and hand painting. I have another sign idea in mind, so hopefully the lessons learned will be applied there. It looks great in my shop next to a metal fallout sign I got ages ago.

Pallet Wood Florida

Posted on by
Reply

I am not really into the shabby chic movement as a whole. I guess it is good to repurpose things, but it isn’t really my style. That said, I have seen some cool pallet art that is of different states made out of random bits of wood. I liked this idea and decided to go with it. My rock project came in on 10 pallets, so there was no shortage in available materials.

I started by using my mini projector to project a silhouette of Florida onto a sheet of butcher paper. It is such a weirdly shaped state that I had to add a little panhandle extension to the paper. I traced the shape while making simplifications for all the waterways, and cut it out.

With a serviceable template in hand I headed to the shop and set about tracing it onto a sheet of 1/2″ plywood. I wanted this to serve as the backbone of the sign. I didn’t want it to show up around the edges, so after tracing it I offset the line inwards to hide it behind the pallet parts.

With that cut I assembled pieces of pallet from my collection in the rough shape of Florida. I used the template to make sure I had enough coverage. I clamped them together and again traced the outline.

Now I can go through and trim up each individual piece to shape. It took a lot of time with a jigsaw and my spindle sander, but I got the shapes I wanted. A heavy smear of glue and a lot of pin nails holds all the pallet pieces down to the plywood I cut earlier. The plywood is recessed enough that you can’t even tell it is there from the front.

I gave everything a super thick coating of Boiled Linseed Oil and let it dry. A wire across the back acts as hanging gear where I put it up on the porch. It makes a really nice addition in the corner where I have my grill and smoker sitting.