A road less travelled

Little did we know a trip in March to Lethbridge was to be our last as a team. Jeff's Volleyball team had a AVA (Alberta Volleyball Association) sanctioned event. Your placement at these events helps to determine your ranking for Provincials and in turn Nationals. The first AVA was a bit of a struggle, the boys needed to find out who they were and what they needed to do as individuals and as a collective. AVA #2 in Lethbridge was another test to see if they have started to find their way. And they did, they struggled against adversity and found a way to win. Taking the gold medal home. Sadly it was only a week later that Canada started to shut down, and our volleyball season was over.

Congrats to the Canuck U18 Men for finishing on top!!

The nice thing about social distancing is that working in my shop is not only OK, but encouraged....so work away I did. After separation of the table top from the clamps it was time for a trim and test fit in the frame. Although this is the underside of the table, it gives us a great view of how things will look. During the design process, we thought this would be great as multi use table. I mean is has two sides, so we could use one side for eating and maybe the other side for, oh I dont know.......crib perhaps!

So after a little jigging, I was able to come up with a simple yet effective solution. After I had gotten things the way I liked I was able to sneak the frame away to be powder coated.

While I waited for the return of the table frame I started to muse about reinstalling a small glass panel in a door at the front in the lower dash. The glass is....well from 1949....so it is weathered and yellowed. I was musing one day about putting a custom privacy film on the glass. I was playing with a 3D printed model of the Flxible emblem when I was struck by an idea. What if......

I rummaged through cupboards until I found a picture projector that we bought when the kids were young for arts and crafts and school projects. I then printed out the logo...

And projected it onto paper to see if my idea would look good.

And wouldn't you know it....an idea was born. The table is beautiful, maple and walnut make a beautiful match, but what if we adorned the table with the emblem on one side and Fillmore's name on the other! I threw out the idea to Shawn and Adele and it was met with intrigue and encouragement. Shawn, being an additional step over the top than me, threw out another idea. The plan was to get the PDF files of the art work to a shop that has a CNC machine and router the artwork into the table top. Shawn's addition was to metal inlay the emblem. I loved the idea and started to experiment.

With a piece of scrap wood from the table top , we routed a random shape into the wood. After considering traditional casting techniques for metal we opted for a slightly more obscure option, a road less travelled.

After fashioning a home made ladle we used a hand torch with MAP gas to melt solder....yep solder.

A bit of a gong show but we did get an idea of how this could work.

After some rough sanding I employed the services of our resident acrylic project expert and we applied an acrylic top coat to see what things could look like

Although not fully set in this pic, the results are promising. As the blog lags behind real time, I will just say this......this is journey has been less like a road less traveled and more like a cross bewteen following  a deer trail and bushwacking.....the journey is not over yet!