Raising Children NetworkThis is Wonder Wart-Hog, one of my husband’s favorite comic book characters, marked for painting. The piece is about 2-1/2 feet tall. The outline for cutting him out on the CNC set up with computer-guided torch, was pretty simple this time. The painting – front and back – is intimidating because of all the detail.
I’ve been doing a bit each day. I think I will finish one side of him today after we get back from Lunch Bunch and errands. I hope my husband is pleased with my efforts. If he is, I’ll try to get a pic when the paint is dry before I turn the piece over to paint the second side.
This is Wonder Wart-Hog. We cut the design out with our CNC set-up plus computer-guided torch from fairly heavy sheet metal. My husband used angle iron to make the piece along the bottom that attaches the design to the mailbox. We hang the piece from an iron stake on an old wheel base so that we can mark it for painting.
If you’ll look carefully, you can see his ears at the top. Wonder Wart-Hog is sitting on big boulder. You can see a knee.
Using our overhead projector, I marked key areas as best I could with magic marker front and back. I will try to refine this using a color printout.
This will be a difficult piece for me to paint. There is a lot of detail, most of which is done with paint, rather than cut out on the machine. It’s one of my husband’s favorite comic book characters. He overcame some problems in trying to do the creation and welding of the attachment piece.
I’ll do the very best I can to make his character come to life.
We received some much welcome rain the past couple of days. My husband is muttering because the rain means our grass will grow and he’ll have to mow again. :0) It was nice. We opened front and back doors, enjoying a beautiful breeze and nice, fresh air throughout. I’m very happy the worst of the summer hot and humid is behind us now.
It was a fight, but we got the “Wonder Wart-Hog” mailbox decoration outline cut out on the CNC table last night. I don’t have a copy of the image we’re using, but I’ll take pics as we progress. We hadn’t done a new decoration for a long time. My husband had to figure out again how to make the program work that converts an image to G-Code, the language the computer can follow. We then had problems because the image was WAAAY too large. We came back in, changed the dimensions, and went back out to the shop, but the computer out there wasn’t seeing the changes. After several times back and forth, he figured out that while he saved the changes, he hadn’t run the “G-code” part of the program again. He did that, saved it, and we went back out. This time things looked good.
We ran the program without the torch turned on to make sure the torch wouldn’t run off the edge of the sheet metal anywhere. We had only part of one 4×8 sheet to use, so if we made a mistake, that would be the end of the project until we were able to go to Ft. Smith to buy more. Happily, it looked like we had a good amount for the image.
We changed the torch tips, then turned on the air compressor and the torch. I’m always fascinated to watch the torch move on its own, moving in a mysterious ‘dance’ over the sheet metal in a magical way, cutting a line trough the metal. We’ve had problems in the past with the torch acting up, but this time everything went well. The torch was going exactly the right speed to cut through the metal like butter.
The next step will be for my husband to make the metal attachment that we use to attach the piece to the mailbox. His hands shake now, so this may be a real challenge – one of the reasons we haven’t made many decorations lately. We are not in a hurry, so I’m encouraging him to do the welding in really short sessions, waiting for a less-shaky day or part of the day. If we can get this done, the next step will be marking the design on the cut out metal.
A young lady showed up at the door last night, asking if we had seen her dog. I’m not sure what kind of dog she had, but the picture showed a medium-to-larger sized dog with brindle coloring. She said her name is Bella. We hadn’t seen her. She left me her phone number. I will text her later to see if she has found her sweet dog.