Upcycle Project Progress

I am a day late in posting this because I was taking the FE exam yesterday so that took a bit of precedent. So far since last post I have gone deeper into the design of the wall hanger, including sketching more and getting some CAD drawn up. You can see in the featured image the assembly of the backboard the two bird motif supports and a rough outline of the flute itself. This is the current idea for the artifact, some minor things are sure to change as I get in the woodshop and chat more with Josh as well I have some ideas I haven’t settled on yet. For example I currently have the bird motifs modeled at full thickness of the board, but for their proportions to look better I may slim them down

I plan on planing a 4/4 (1″) cherry board to a nice surface then using off cuts of cherry for the bird motifs I will cut the backboard to dimension, round or break the edges of it. After that I will sketch out the pattern of the birds onto the cheery and either rough jig-saw or scroll saw them out, then sand and file them to shape. Figure 2 shows a cross section of one of the bird motifs and its joint with the backboard. I have chosen a simple mortise-tenon joint, I will cut a mortise into the backboard and the base of each bird motif will act as tenons. Once I’ve shaped the mortises I will glue the tenons in to create a very strong joint, overly strong in this scenario. Once I have finished

Once the piece is glued together I will want to finish it to improve the surface look, feel, and longevity. There are many different types of surface finishes I could choose from but after some research I have opted to go with a gentle natural oil finish and maybe a coat of shellac if that is something Josh has available in the woodshop. You can see in Figure 2 and 3 the real highlight of cherry, even with a minimal finish it develops immense color over time due to oxidation and UV light. The only issue is that in this example it took 3 years to get to such a beautiful color, Derik VanFleet says you can induce coloring prematurely by exposing the piece to sunlight for a while to condition it so I may try that, or jut let the natural process take its course. I am excited to get into the shop next week and really dive deep into the hand on building of this project.

References:

https://www.vanvleetwoodworking.com/blog/2018/3/18/finishing-cherry-wood-how-to