1st sign a success

[Xray]

First ever sign for me, though pretty basic, I'm happy with it. Made for some biker buddies of mine, wasn't much pressure, as I'm not charging anything for it. If I was doing this for say a bar or a store, I'd have to ask around $200 or so, hand painted like that. Just the cut and they paint, $100. I'm guessing that might be a little on the cheap side for quality work, I have yet to learn much about pricing.
Made from MDF, this is about the max that the Stinger can handle at about 22x34" ,, Easy to see why guys look to upgrade in size ASAP.

I did two of these, the first one I liked, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought I could do better.
The problem was, the logo and the word "DETROIT" came out fine using the Vbit, but the smaller lettering under the logo didn't look so good.
Cut at the same depth as the rest, .175, the last pass obliterated much of the lettering details.
So I finally figured out how to create multiple toolpaths for the same project, and that did the trick. I reduced the cut depth to .125 for the smaller letters, and they came out looking great.
I wish I had learned about pocket toolpaths before I made this, else I would have cleared out the O's and R's ect too.
This project has been a good learning experience for me ... I still have a few touchups to do to it, but I think they'll like it [if you don't hear from me for about 3 months, that means they didn't!].

[GJMATHEWS]

Way to go dude. I am sure they will like it and I am willing to bet you get orders for more.

[Mark Johnston]

Nice Doug.

The best thing of all is the learning experience and the confidence that you get every step of the way. Keep up the good work.

Mark

[T.R.MacMunn]

Pretty nice for your first try, Doug. My first sign wasn't anywhere near as professional looking as that.

I don't like V-carved letters much, but that's just personal preference. As a result, I don't do them a lot but when I do, I use a 120* bit for the larger letters & a 90* bit for smaller ones. Really small, a 60* bit.
I hate painting in the V-grooved letters so I try to prepaint the background & rout through it. If you put a paintmask over it & rout through it, that'll let you paint the letters in quickly.

Once you get a few under your belt, I'll gladly share my pricing formulae with you.

[Xray]

Biker clubs live & die for their colors, so there was no way I was going to present this to them if it looked like a 7th grade woodshop project. Its something they'll hang in the club and might well be there for years or generations, so its worth the effort to make it as perfect as possible.
They do have chapters in other cities, so its very possible they'll want more.

Silver is a pain to work with, especially brush work. My silver was a bit too thick, I got lazy and tried to make do with it instead of running to the basement to get some thinner as I should have. As a result, the brush strokes show pretty bad on close inspection. Of course, you can pick anything apart looking at it closely ,,, But I'm going to sand down the silver a bit, and go over it again with some thinned product.

[james mcgrew]

each sign will add only to experience, funny thing clients will love them and then one day you will look back and realize how far you have come.

this sign looks pretty good to me!!

[Xray]

Have come a little ways since "Xrays New Machine!", huh Jim ?
I couldn't even turn the machine on, and that was just a few weeks ago.

This sign lends itself to looking good.
Simple yet elegant, silver & black just looks sweet.
I did one with the pockets cut out too, I'll post that when I get it painted. The only thing I'm not liking with the pocket cuts is now the texture is mismatched, but it should look pretty good painted up.
That silver is a PITA to work with, got to get it thinned just right, and use the right brush.

[Mick Martin]

Nice Job Doug, you will find as you gain more experience what you can and can not do. [clap]
Mick

[Xray]

I ended up doing another one. Not sure how it happened, but the first one lacked a very obvious matter of detail - Teeth. The skull has teeth, and the software I used to vectorize must have smoothed them out.
Didn't notice until a couple of days later, glad I did. Would have been pretty embarrassing to present an outlaw biker club with a skull that looks like a toothless old man.
I'm going to either give it to them anyway, might make a good garage hanger for one of them, or destroy it, haven't decided which yet.
I cut the pockets out of this one, in the wings and letters. Only thing I don't like about that is the texture difference, but I guess theres not much that can be done about that.

Anyhow, the other one turned out nice. Does have some jagged artifacts here and there, I should have smoothed them out editing nodes, but I am just now getting up to speed on node editing.
When and if I do another one, it should be near perfect.