The Making of the Led Zep Plaque!

Not another first for me but worth a mention since I like it! I made it for my daughter Becca for christmas, using a scrap piece of wood that I had laying around and wanting to do something "different", I think I hit that mark... Enjoy the pics, click on the thumbnails to get a larger picture!

The first thing that needed to be done, as with almost all the wood projects, is to develop the patterns on the computer, print them out, glue them to the wood to be cut out, and cut the wood into a workable piece. I used a 1/4" Baltic Birch plywood for this.

The next step in Scrolling is to prep the piece to be sawed! Since Fretwork is defined as "intricate inside cuts on a solid piece of material", you have to cut the inside, without any intrusion from the outside of the piece. I use my Dremmel and a 1/64" drill bit to drill pilot holes for the saw blades. You want the smallest pilot hole possible as to not drill into the finished part of the wood. This one was easy to a point, the real difficult thing was working with small pieces of wood, being careful not to cut them too thin!

After the prepping comes the cutting. I guess the hardest on these were to keep them as accurate as possible. Curves are good, but circle cut-outs can be a nightmare, especially keeping the width the same throughout the piece! here are some pics of the cutting. I also took a piece of Red Oak and cut out the "bad" section of it to get that peculiar shape. Everything fit perfect!

Of course, last but not least, is the finishing of the piece. After sanding, routing the plaque base and prepping, I used "Golden Oak" to stain the symbols and "Dark Walnut" on the base. Used my router to make hanging cuts on the back, glued the pieces together using "Weldwood", and there you have it! I hope you enjoyed the pics, more to come for other projects...