For Christmas, I decided to make everyone coasters out of wood. Some are patterns of different wood and others are burned (pyrography), I tried to come up with a couple of different patterns for everyone and decided to do a couple of theme of schools and group the coasters by location with a set per location of family members.
This project ended up being another project in mass production. During construction, I glued together blocks of wood and then cut them into slices, the thickness of the coaster. In doing this project, I ran into a few complications that I learned how to work through. First, I started smoking out the garage that ended up being in part due to a dull blade on the chop saw. Secondly, there wasn’t much material to hold the pieces with when I cut them to thickness. As such, I made jig to hold the piece in place on the chop saw. In general it worked pretty well, but one piece did shatter when I was cutting it and that was a little startling as pieces flew about.
This was also my first time to try to doing pyrography that would be a gift for someone else which was also worrisome. In general I thought it would be a good learning experience but stated to have second guesses when I saw the logo for PItt State.
Overall the pieces turned out alright and I learned many new things in the process. The project did take me longer than expected and I ended up shipping out the gifts after the Christmas holiday.
