Oval Cherry Signs with Wrought Iron Hangers

[Keith Outten]

Matt,

I'm working on that one to Matt. I recently bought two 24 foot lengths of square tubing. One length of 2" and one length of 2.5" square. I got tired of paying 20 bucks for short lengths of prefabricated receivers and decided to buy 24 feet. Now I can make all the receivers I want and put them everywhere.

Besides my truck hitch I have receivers mounted on my Dixie Chopper, Cub Cadet, Kabota tractor FEL, trailer and will soon replace both of the wooden support posts in my shop with steel pipe so I can weld receivers to the posts.

I have a one ton lifting boom that I welded a piece of 2" square to the bottom support so it can be used by all of my equipment and will be real handy in those new steel shop supports as well

I mounted an old hand crank boat winch to a piece of 2" square and use it to pull and lift stuff all the time. When I purchased my laser engraver I used the boat winch to pull it up the stairs to my second story shop office on a sled. The older I get the less I lift

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[Keith Outten]

A sneak peek at a couple of my oval signs sitting on my ShopBot with the hangers installed. Tomorrow I hope to be able to install these signs, I have been waiting on the building manager to provide location and height to install but he has been out of town.

The second picture is the dirty part of the job...fitting, welding and grinding the hangers. After they were painted I had to setup a custom jig that allowed me to level the hanger and position the oval for drilling since you can't use a level on an oval.

I will take plenty of photographs after the install for my scrap book and will post a few here for everyone to critique.

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[Mike Null]

Keith

Beautiful stuff but I'm at a loss as to how you applied the gold fill.

[Keith Outten]

Mike,

We couldn't use plastic inlay because we would have lost the detail in the font, it has delicate corners. Our only option since the machining was already complete was to paint the V-Carved areas with a small brush. Using acrylic paint we were able to wipe any paint that got on the surface with a wet towel. This was the hard way I guess but it was worth it to maintain the detail and the overall look of the sign design.

Using gold leaf would have been a nice option but we had to pick up a similar color in the building that was used on the handrails which was an anodized satin gold. When you see the install pictures you will see what I mean as the handrail is very prevalent in the building along with a half million dollars of cherry paneling in the three story atrium area.

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