Planchettes v1.6

I have made about five batches of planchettes since I first posted about them. This post is about batch #3, i.e. version 1.6. I'll try to keep it brief, because I just finished batch #4, i.e. version 2.0. 

Version 1.6 was just like version 1.5, except they had laser engravings on the top surface. It was a medium sized batch of about 17 units. All were made from hardwood, though some were made from planks that I planed down to thickness, and some were made from thin (1/8") stock I usually use in my laser. The laser stock ones were too thin to put a glass oculus into, so only the ones I planed got that. The woods used were red oak (laser stock), spalted buckeye, and hickory.  I didn't take many pictures of the production process, as most of it happened on the laser. Below are the planchettes hanging on a rack drying after being coated with either Danish oil or Tung oil finish. I can't remember which.

 I did learn a few things from this experimental batch.
First, although the laser stock wood will cut all the way through on the laser, it is really a little too thin to make a nice planchette, and definitely too thin to inset a glass oculus. The planed down boards on the other hand are a good thickness for drilling and insetting the glass, but even though they are technically under the maximum thickness for the laser, they are really too thick to cut through all the way by that method. In the future, I will likely just score the outer outline on the laser and do the rough cutting on the band saw and sand up to the line on the disk sander, like v1.0 and v1.5.

Second, due to possible alignment error when drilling out the center hole, I should mark the center of the hole with the laser by scoring a cross-hair, but NOT score the actual circle to be cut out. Any misalignment of the drill bit can cause the score line to be visible even after the hold is drilled.

Third, when using thin stock, orient the grain of the wood with the long axis of the planchette, or at a diagonal. Doing otherwise will create a weak point at the sides of the center hole, where the body is very narrow. 

Here they are again, waiting for the next coat of finish.

This batch with the laser engraving was very popular both on my Etsy store and in my brick and mortar shop. All of my offerings in my Etsy shop are sold out and I only have two left in the brick and mortar store. You can mostly make out all of the designs in the picture above, but I only took glamor shots of the ones that were going to be sold online. So, here they are-

This was a smallish batch that was finished fairly quickly. It only took a couple of days from start to finish. Its main purpose was to test the idea of cutting out planchettes on the laser, and for engraving the tops with designs.

Laser Etched Mirror Altar Tiles

I think I posted already about the first one of these I made, and since these were done on the laser, there really isn't much to say about this project, so I'll just post a picture of the final pieces.

These are 8" beveled mirror trivets (candle holders?) purchased from Walmart. I used to make quite a few of these into customized altar tiles with acid paste etching, but using the laser I can get a much more complex image with much less work. The only down side is, the surface finish of the laser etched area is quite rough, unlike using the acid paste. But I could never get this kind of detail with a hand cut stencil, so it's a trade off.

Book of Shadows Signage v3.0 (part 4)

Well, it's been a year and a half since the last post about the new sign for the store, and over two years since I started making it, but the new sign has finally been installed at the store. Thanksgiving morning, 5am, I woke up and decided, "Today is the day"- and Voilà!

I already posted about the making of the main sign, and the making of the fretwork accent pieces, so here I will just post about the installation and give you a few pics of the finished sign in situ.

Before I could install the sign, I had to re-face the marquee with some new plywood, as the old T1-11 was badly rotted. Ideally I should have ripped down the rotted T1-11 and replaced it, but with the building in as bad of shape as it is, I thought it better to just leave it and sheath over it with some fresh plywood.

Each piece of plywood was pre-cut (5ft tall) and pre-painted before going up on the marquee. They were given three coats of brown exterior house paint, on both sides, and I even used some paintable siliconized acrylic caulking around the edges of each board after the second coat. Hopefully, this will help keep water from deteriorating the plywood prematurely. Each panel was lifted up by hand, with the help of a ground man, and screwed to the marquee face with a prodigious amount of screws. I got as many as I could into the studs, and then just peppered the rest with screws, hoping I would hit something solid underneath. The last panel, on the right side in the picture, was about 2.5 inches too wide. But I was not about to take it down, trim it, reseal and repaint the cut edge and put it back up. It was a HUGE effort to get those panels in place. I am afraid of heights, so working on the porch roof was very difficult and stressful. It can just hang over the right edge by a couple of inches. No one will care. Most people won't even notice.

Raising the panels in place and securing them was easy compared to the sign itself. The main sign is a full sheet of plywood, plus the weight of all the lettering attached to it. My ground man (Delvin is his name) and I muscled the sign up onto the porch roof and let it rest on some 2x4 blocks nailed to the porch roof, while I climbed back up onto the roof and then man-handled it up the rest of the way from there. It was a Herculean task, but by some miracle, I got it up there and rested the bottom edge on a pair of screws that were set into the marquee at the correct height for the bottom edge of the sign (this screw-ledge trick is also how I put the panels in place). After the sign was nudged into its final position, and a couple of screws driven in to secure it, I could remove the ledge-screws. Since the sign was being screwed into the fresh plywood facing, it didn't really matter if the screws went into the studs, but I tried to get some in the studs anyway.

That damned backwards "a" still haunts me.

So that was one day's work, just getting the panels and main sign up. Then I had to wait a few days for good weather until I could finish adding the decorative pieces that flank the sign.

Before I could hang the fretwork pieces, I had to fabricate some brackets for them. I didn't want to drill through the copper facing (or even through the wood) so I cut some pieces of steel and drilled and countersunk holes for screws. I screwed the brackets onto the fret pieces from the back side, and then through the front side I could drive the screws in to attach it to the building. I painted the brackets brown so that they would blend in with the marquee and become invisible.

On the second day of hanging, I was all alone with no ground man. Luckily, the pieces I had to hang were much smaller and lighter. I just took my time and walked them up the ladder one piece at a time. I did have to get up and down the ladder a few times to make sure the fret pieces were straight. It's very hard to tell if something looks straight from up close like that, and measurements can only get you so far.

Only one last thing to hang- the 30" tall brass carriage lights. I bought these things from a flea market about eight years ago. I paid $1. For the pair. Seriously, one dollar. The finish was a bit worn and there was a little corrosion, but I cleaned them up as best as I could (without exerting too much effort) with some polishing compound. I tested that they worked before hanging them, but I'm not sure if I will be able to wire them up. In any event they needed some kind of bracket as well, since they will not be mounted to a gang box like they were designed to be.

The bracket I came up with was a little hacked together, but I was under a time crunch. They were made from 3/4" oak recycled shelving material. I designed them to have a hole in the back for the wires to poke through. Then, when I got them up on the roof, I drilled a 1" hole through the marquee for the wires to feed through. The plan is to wire them from the inside of the building after they are hung. This I can do any time and in any weather. Or not at all, if I never get around to it.  In any event, the mounting bracket now gave me something to screw to the plywood on the marquee.

And that's just about it. For now anyway. There are two more details to be taken care of, but I wasn't going to delay this post any longer. I need to install some flashing along the top edge of the marquee to serve as a drip edge. There used to be some roll roofing that hung over it (you can still see remnants of it in the pics) but it had to be ripped down to put up the panels (and it was rotted). I bought some brown aluminum gutter that I plan to re-bend and hang upside-down over the front edge to serve as a flashing (and no, I don't plan on making another post just for that little finishing detail). And the other thing is to wire the lights (assuming that ever happens).

So, two and a half years in the making, and it is finally finished (90%, anyway). And I do like the way it looks. Hopefully, it will survive the weather for at least a few years. I'm certainly not looking forward to doing it again.

Here are a few more finished pics. The sun was going down and the front of the store was in shadow, so next chance I get I will take some pics with better light and add them to the end here.

See Also:
Book of Shadows Signage v3.0 (part 1)
Book of Shadows Signage v3.0 (part 2)
Book of Shadows Signage v3.0 (part 3)


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Second Video - Glass Etching

Hey gang, I have finally gotten around to uploading another video to my YouTube channel! I have two or three more already in production, but editing takes a long time, so it has taken me a while to get another one up there.

By the time you read this, the video will have been published several weeks ago. I already had several blog posts scheduled and I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the Book of Shadows Sign posts. The cool thing is, by the time I had even finished editing some of the YouTube extras, like the end screen links to other videos, I already had 3 views and a comment! Pretty neat.

Ok, So here is the second video. As I stated before, for the foreseeable future, anytime I publish a video to my YouTube channel, I will also publish it as a blog post here. If you would like to help me grow my YouTube channel, please, Like, Comment and Subscribe. Oh, and share ;)


This video is a demonstration of using Armour Etch glass etching paste to etch a design onto a glass goblet.I have posted about my etched glass projects here before. This project is nothing new to this blog. But here is an opportunity to see the process as it is being done in my workshop.

I am still very new to video making, so if you have any comments or suggestions about the video itself, my editing, technique, direction, composition, whatever, feel free to comment. I am still working through finding the right software for my needs. I don't have a good camera, so I am using my cell phone and an app called Open Camera, which seems to work better than my camera's native app. I had been using Windows Movie Maker, and that had some nice features, but it was very limiting. I really like HitFilm 4. It has some crazy good features and FX, but it makes my computer groan just loading it. This time I tried a new editor called Shotcut. I think it might become my go-to editor. It isn't as fancy as HitFilm, but it is closer to that style of editor than WMM is, and it will run on my computer. Well enough, anyway.

Thing in a Bottle v2.0

A few years ago I made my first Thing in a Bottle out of a glass apothecary jar and a dollar store toy "grows in water" starfish. For my second Thing in a Bottle, I used an apothecary jar with a smaller opening and I used a toy snake instead of a starfish, hoping it would give me a better look once it was in the bottle.

 The first step was to soak the snake in water for a few days, clean it off and let it dry out and shrink again. I don't know why, but for some reason, the first time you grow these things they end up creating a thick coating of slime all over themselves. That needed to be cleaned off before I could paint it.

After cleaning off the slime and allowing the snake to dry out and re-shrink, I cut off its tail. The whole snake would have been far too large to fit into the jar once expanded, so I only used a small piece of the tail.  Then I used an exacto knife to cut the stump into four tentacles, to make the new "head" look like a tentacle faced worm. As crude as my effort was, it still looks better than a cut off stump.

 Next I painted the thing with acrylic paints mixed with latex rubber. I made sure that I left the paint job spotty, with thin areas and small areas that had no paint. This would ensure that the latex would stretch unevenly when the thing grew, causing the surface color and texture of the original snake to show through in places. It makes for a very interesting skin texture. I also used permanent markers to color some areas, like the new "mouth".

 Then I put the specimen into the jar and filled it with water. After a few days it will soak up the water and grow to several times its original size. I will have to top off the water as it grows.

After it was grown, I topped off the water level and added a little red UV reactive dye. I normally go for yellows and greens in these types of things, but I thought I would try something different. 

 I just love how the latex stretches and gives me that unique mottled skin appearance.

 Finally, it was capped with a cork and the cork was tied on with hemp twine. I like this look better than the wax seal most people use. In order to prevent the water from evaporating through the cork, I first coated the cork with a little clear silicone sealant. I can't remember for certain, but I think I picked up that trick from Propnomicon.

That's pretty much where it stayed for a little while. This prop was originally made for use in the Aethernauts LARP at Origins, so I didn't do any labeling or antiquing to it, as it was meant to be a specimen captured by the ship's doctor just recently.

 However, after the LARP was finished, I did add a Miskatonic University label to the jar as well as some antiquing to the bottle.

 The label was printed on paper and antiqued with tea and/or walnut crystals. It was written on with a quill pen and sepia ink. Then it was white glued to the bottle, and after the glue was dry, I sanded the edges of the label to simulate years of wear.

 The bottle was antiqued by lightly misting it from above with spray on adhesive. Then it was gently sprinkled with black grout mix powder.

 Et voila. A specimen of an unidentified parasite fit for a fictional university collection.