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Making a picture into wood


Smallpatch

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Gerald, right now the pieces are just laying on the backer board. I glue up boards big enough so the outside of the wood is cut into a frame. After I cut out the frame I then glue the backer board on to the frame so I now have a flat basket to reconstruct the pieces as I cut them out with the scroll saw. This lets me carry it all to each station as I do the shaping. Its too easy to miss place the small pieces so from now on while shaping each piece they always go back into the puzzle as I am working on other pieces...This helps to learn where the pieces fits for later as I apply lots of glue on to the backer board I can hopefully remember where each piece goes before the glue sets up..I  use a thin blade to do all the inside cuts so to keep the gaps between pieces as small as I can but with all the gaps added up there is about 1/8" gap created on the top and one side so I lay a thin board in to take up that gap as I glue the pieces back together. Here I use Aleene's  tacky glue, in the brown bottle, for it seems to stay tacky while I do my thing...No clamps for I do lots of pushing in to place while doing the assembly thingy.

  Something I just started doing is after I get the boards glued together and sized to shape I stain the back of the board with a lacquer based stain..quick drying, reason I use it, before I start the inside cuts. This way after I cut out all the pieces I can tell which side not to start carving on..

  The machines I use to do most of the carving and shaping is a 1 x 42" belt and disk sander

..I also use a 9" oscillating drum sander....I also use a vibrating electric sander laying on its back on a rubber drawer liner over the10 inch table saw opening with the dust extractor running to keep the sander cooled the main reason and also to remove the dust...Also I use the bandsaw to shorten the pieces to get the height differences.. And here I cut the top part of the pieces off and discard them not the bottom piece... This way every thing will have the same curvature meaning all the pieces will still fit each piece..And last I use the Dremels with different bits...not too much on this project yet...

   The ends of my fingers are what catches hell for this is the only way to put the small pieces against the sanding material.... On this picture I cut away about 5/8" off the top of each piece I wanted to be shorter...I start with 1 1/16" maple..

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Great scene Patch...I like the addition of the windmill and the Model A's versus having the old hay rake in the scene. Can't go wrong with the main focus being a Cardinal, IMO. I'll be following.

4 hours ago, Smallpatch said:

 I also can't stain the wood where it will be white as snow so question mark on what it will end up looking like.. 

Ever try using liquid shoe polish? I've used paste polish for small areas/touch-up (not white) with success. Wonder how liquid white would appear on this wood?

4 hours ago, Smallpatch said:

The female red bird I traced and she might end up looking like a duck or something???

Sure you know, but the female color is much lighter and more of a pinkish, reddish gray in color. Often, without the pronounced black mask...at least the Northern Cardinal during the winter here.

image.png.831a67475be58d12cb7c6fec2e24fc46.png   image.png.c24615f6d8aaddb748976dbd435c0d4e.png 

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Dave the bottom picture of the cardinals are what ours looks like all the time.

 

I have white india ink, a few tubes of water base white for painting but if I put enough to make it like snow I will have no wood grain showing...I know, a thick layer of snow has nothing showing through but this is wood. I can't afford exotic woods so I like to stain to get those exotic looks..

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When I had my furniture repair shop most of the wood I bleached was walnut.  This was mostly what the better and more expensive furniture was built of back in the sixties and especially the more better antiques. I dealt with mostly rich folks back then for they were the only ones willing to pay the piper...    And maple was the going furniture look back then. It was way too time consuming for the average folks to get in on the changing wood colors..Most walnuts back then was almost black with lots of stains and dyes but I could get the wood to turn a great looking maple..  
Too much trouble for me to mess with anymore!!

  Once a person starts with a commercial wood bleach and get the wood to turn about half way to the desired shades then a regular house hold bleach can take over and keep the wood changing colors... But you can't do it with house hold bleach alone.  Doing it this way the wood will turn in to a greenish light shade but that's fine for the green tint will help make the maple color in the end...

This is one reason I work with mostly two woods now, ash and maple for I can stain most of these two woods and have good results..

  Gene the wood would have to be shaped first for the color change don't go very deep.

Having a furniture repair shop I grew to hate oak because of weather cracks... and still have that same feeling...Most of the time younger folks were given something grandmaw use to have and was generally the most expensive piece she owned... So in the process for the younger crowd to have a place to show it off it actually went in the high humid barn or up in some ones attic, more humidity or anyplace completely different than what that piece of furniture lived in all its life... So when the young finally had a home they then called on me to fix those things up and make them look new again..Oak is the worlds worse to weather crack in my opinion...A long dresser made made from oak might have had only a very short hair line crack when it went in to storage but when it came to me that crack was the length of the wood and sometimes you could drop a nickel into the crack and it would disappear... They couldn't afford to replace all those cracks so they just wanted to hide them..     Impossible to do for a reasonable price...

  They the very expensive furniture started being built with a very good plywood. This was great for that stopped the warping problems... But not all of it if it went into lots of moisture while being stored. At least the long weather cracks all the way through from one side of the piece of wood to the other . So now the veneer of the woods was always thick enough to be stripped with remover then all the scratches sanded out and refinished and would still have more of that top layer of fine wood for another go around for another refinishing later on if they wanted to change the color and style again... Now most veneers are way too thin. 

 Sorry about this story of my younger refinishing days...

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Smallpatch, I am a newcomer, with no woodworking credentials, talent, or, imagination, so please don’t get mad at me for saying this, YOU MUST COMPLETE THIS PROJECT. I love Cardinals, I love your work, and this looks to me like it could be one of your finest (and that’s saying a LOT, quite frankly). The Cardinal was my Mother’s favorite bird, and shortly before She passed, She told me that every time I saw a Cardinal, it would be Her, saying hi. I would enthralled following this from start to finish. Okay, like you needed anymore pressure, sorry. 

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Artie I'll do my best. We have lots of cardinals visit the feeders I constructed here close to the windows. I used some clear plastic containers from animal cracker packages we bought from the Sams Club. I can sit at the computer and turn around and see the birds. We only put the small black sun flower seeds as food so it attracts the Cardinals and tit mouse and a very few of the other birds...We do have lots of the morning Doves but they are too dumb to get out after they get in......We have to go out on the deck and tip the feeder over on its side so they can find their way out.! 

  All the store bought feeders have the same problem for the different birds will throw out all the seed they don't like while searching for their favorite...lots of waste..

   We buy the largest sack of black sun flower seed and keep it in the deep freeze to keep the weavels out...

 

     It was dark this morning when I took the pictures.. One is about a two gallon size and the other a 1 1/2 gallon or so.  I tied them up between two poles so no night time animals can rob it so we can leave it out day and night saving lots of extra labor...the feeder is in the middle of the kitchen window and in the window on the right side in the other picture...The tit mouse puts on a show if you have never seen them hacking their way in to the seed... They get the seed and fly over to a small branch, hold the seed with a foot then beat the crap out of it with their beak till they get to the goodies. Quite a show and other birds sit and watch them and even try to do the same thing but so far no one has succeeded.

  We have had these hanging there for 10 years or so and have never seen a female red bird in the feeder. The males have gotten so use to this set up for they sit in it till they get their fill or until they get run out by other birds squawking trying to get them out for their turn...Now two tit mouses will be in there at once..IMG_1764.JPG.754af45c331edee8c617a20167e0e258.JPGIMG_1765.JPG.ea924a87b021ac18675588742bc34f0b.JPG

 

I'm the dish washer so just look past the dirty sink and the surroundings.

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What dirty sink? It’s good to have inspirations (meaning the birds). When I was a kid we had one of those little feeders that would hang on the kitchen window, where the table was. It was filled with sunflower seeds, and the only birds that would come to that feeder were the chickadee’s. I think they liked watching us eat, as much as we liked watching them. Whatever you choose to make next, I’m looking forwards to following along. 

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