Walleye sign

[DickB]

I just finished this for a customer who found me through my profile on custommade.com. (I haven't done a lot of business there, but then again I don't want a lot of business.) I had a sample walleye sign in my profile; he came up with the phrase.



To design this sign, I got the outline of the walleye from some clip art somewhere to make the cutout (I am not an artist and could not draw this on my own). I added vectors to make the fins using the Select Depth Profile tool. I machined the sign from select pine. After sanding, I stained the edges of the sign, vector cuts, and lettering with Minwax Polyshades Olde Maple (I find the stain/polyurethane mix does not bleed so much). Then sanded the top surface to clean up the excess stain, followed by a couple coats of Minwax Polyurethane Gloss, with a final coat of Minwax Polyurethane Satin from a spray can.

I like doing this type of sign. Materials are inexpensive, there is not a lot of machine time, and finishing is quick and easy requiring very little artistic talent - well, none really. If you're curious, I charged $69.99 for this sign. Don't work too cheap.

I'm posting two versions of the mpc. "Walleye Sign" was done with Designer 1 and Centerline Text. (If you don't have Centerline, you can easily change the text to Raster.) "old fisherman" was done with Designer 2 so that I could better conform the lettering to the body of the fish. I lay out most of my projects to be made using a jig. The rectangle represents my actual board and the area outside the rectangle my jig. You can adjust to suit your own methods. You may want to check and change the cutout bit and max depth per pass. I use a jig and router to put keyholes on the back, not the Carvewright, but of course you could add that if you have the feature.

[dltccf]

Nice Job. You say you have no artistic talent, but you are wrong about that.

dave

[Bigtyme]

Nice work, DickB and thanks for sharing. I am also on Custom Made and have gotten a lot of projects through them, but too busy lately to spend much time on it. I like it as you can pick and choose which projects to propose on....

[Canemaker]

Is it possible you can resave this to 1.187 thanks... if not that's ok, I'll just admire yours.

[DickB]

Is it possible you can resave this to 1.187 thanks... if not that's ok, I'll just admire yours.

Walleye Sign.mpc is Designer 1.187. The sign in the picture (old fisherman.mpc) uses a Designer 2 feature to "bend" the text, but you can edit the Designer 1 version to approximate the old fisherman text layout - maybe break it into individual words.

BTW it is not possible to save a Designer 2 project as Designer 1, but it is possible to load a Designer 1 project into Designer 2. So, I generally will design a project with Designer 1 for the most flexibility, and use Designer 2 only if there is a feature that I need. That was the case here. The project was initially laid out with Designer 1. When I needed to add more text, I needed to shape it with a Designer 2 feature, hence the two versions.

[Capt Bruce]

Very nice design DickB and we all appreciate you sharing this with the Forum. Good on Ya Mate!