RabidAlien

I'm workin my way through the Inkscape tutorials now myself! There's a healthy sense of pride and satisfaction at creating a pattern, then cutting the pattern, yourself.

Yep, pretty much across the harbor, if I recall my geography correctly.

Thanks, y'all!

Whether you use a straight flag or a waving flag, please, for the love of all things American, put the flag the correct direction. The Union (blue field with stars) should ALWAYS be on the "speakers" right. Which means, as you're viewing it, the Union will be on the VIEWERS left. This means that when you display the flag vertically, you don't just unpin three corners and rotate it 90-degrees clockwise. I've run across a lot of really cool Tshirts or other artwork that I would have paid for....except the flag was backwards.

Finally complete! This one took a while to cut because of all of the turns and nooks and crannies, plus having to watch out for some tenuous connections to various islands. I used 1/8 BB ply, double-stacked and taped. Only had two little pieces that had to be re-glued, the barrel shroud and the details of the magazine below his right hand. In retrospect, there was a spot at the end of the barrel shroud that could've been bridged to give it an anchor on both ends. Hindsight being 20/20 and all that. Otherwise, I'm VERY happy with how this turned out! Per my discussion with Joonho Kim (http://tacticaldrawings.com/), I'm not posting a complete picture to discourage anyone from running across the photo and making their own template to cut and sell (images are different sizes and slightly different angles to discourage the same). So this one is going to hang on the wall in my house....the second one, I'm heading to the Post Office and sending to Mr. Kim this morning in thanks for letting me use his art. I discovered a problem in the text when I drilled the first pilot hole for my pin-ended blades....again, in hindsight, I should've gone back and reprinted the text using a larger font, that would've helped the holes blend better. Lesson learned: make sure your pattern has a wide enough spot for pilot holes, if you can't afford a fancy-schmancy new scroll saw. Frame was made out of a piece of 1x2 Poplar, stained Walnut. Backing is something cheap and thin from Lowes, also Walnut. Minuteman was finished with BLO.

Heh. After a discussion of queso and all of its goodness at work the other day, I was on the hunt for a Steve Good-esque wordart pattern that said "Queso IS Life". Couldn't find one....so....I'm learning how to make one. Also working on one that says: 1. Coffee. 2. Everything else.

Damn good for a first try! Now, put that in a place you can see it easily, so you can look at that and look at your current project and see how far you've come. But like Woodrush said.....you've got talent!

Liquid gold. It is the cheesy goodness that you humbly thank the Lord for before dipping your tortilla chip into (preferably AFTER first dipping it into refried beans). Some places, it is known as "cheese sauce" or "cheese dip", but these places are wrong.

Awesome!!!! Go Navy! I was stationed in San Diego (Point Loma sub base) for a while, 94-95ish.

Nice! I've got several Steve Good patterns queued up. Also going through the Inkscape tutorials in the University, looking to try my hand at some word-art. Steve Good is awesome, but he doesn't have anything extolling the virtues of queso. That's just...wrong.

Not much of a chess player, myself (always wondered were the trebuchets and main battle tanks were...why close with the enemy when you can pick them off from a distance without putting down your cup o' coffee?)....but I've always appreciated the craftsmanship that goes into a nice chess set. Been thinking about making one of my own, now that I've pretty much finished up my current obsessi....er...project. Well done!

Heh....love the coffin base!

Frikkin AWESOME!

I sit, I have a perfectly good bar-stool (with back!) that got some paint splashed on the legs once, so the wife was going to throw it out as "ruined". I've got two Kobalt workbenches (purchased from Lowes when we moved), not sure what height they are, but the bar stool is a good height. My Dremel scrollsaw sits flat on an old mousepad to keep it from vibrating and wandering across the work area (the suction cups that keep it in place....suck. They're old, though, guess I can't fault them). I may try raising the rear of the saw, see how that works.

Heh. If you haven't had that happen to you...then you've never scrolled.

Thanks, all! Still looking into it, but still leaning towards the Excaliburs.

I'm looking at upgrading my old Dremel 57-2...been a good saw, and I've definitely gotten my $25 out of it (yay yard-sales!), but it needs to be upgraded. Those 3" pin-end blades are too big to do some of the detailed cuts I'd like to be doing. So I was looking at the DeWalt 788, and while I like my DeWalt drill, it seems like there's enough down-sides that making the leap to an Excalibur would be the way to go. I hate having to upgrade every two or three years, I want to buy something and not have to worry about it. Then I read where Excalibur went through some rough times, and just recently started making saws again and the quality may or may not still be there. And someone in an Amazon review mentioned Jet. There's not a lot of reviews on the Jets, but they're comparably priced to the Excaliburs and the reviews are, by and large, all 5-stars with the one oddball 1-star review that may or may not have been user error or someone mad at Amazon for something unrelated to the saw. So....off to the experts (y'all)! Would there be anything that makes the Excalibur stand out over the Jet, or vice -versa? Or should I stop overthinking this and just buy one as they're both top-quality? Sorry if I don't make sense....Mountain Dew hasn't kicked in yet, and I woke up with a screaming headache that makes me want to take up heavy drinking so that I have an excuse for waking up with these screaming headaches.

Nicely done, your cutting is!

I'm humbled....my first scroll-saw project involved cutting out the interior of the letter "e" in a cursive "caffeine" sign.

Due to the move and getting settled in the new house and all the honey-do's associated with that, its been probably two months since I scrolled. I want to get back to an on-going project (see works in progress, Modern Minuteman), but that requires more time than I typically have after work. So I threw a couple of these out just to scratch that scroll-saw itch.

Freehanded some bases for them, too. I'm not going to attach it to the base, in case I ever feel the need to toss one at somebody.

Would love to....still got bills to pay, though.

I have an old Dremel 57-2 ($25 at a yard-sale!!) that uses 3" pin-end blades. I found a trick online that actually works, though....if you take a piece of thick metal, drill a tiny hole in it (just barely bigger than the pin....start with your smallest drillbit, and if the pin doesn't fit, use that as a pilot hole for the next size up until you have a hole that barely fits the pin). Take a scrap wooden block, drill another hole through it (any size, I think I used a 1/2" bit), then firmly attach the piece of metal with the holes lining up. Place the pin into the hole so that the blade lies flat on the metal with the pin sticking up, and tap it with a hammer. One light tap usually knocks it flush with the blade. You can then either use a pair of pliers on the other side to wiggle it free, or use an old icepick to poke it the rest of the way through. This leaves a hole in the end of the blade, but makes it so that you can drill and thread the blade through a slightly smaller hole. To attach the blade to the saw again, simply take a paperclip, trim off a small section near the curve so that you have a "U" shape, and thread that through the pinhole. Now mount it to the saw as you normally would. May not make *much* of a difference in pilot hole size, but it definitely makes threading the darn holes easier, and if you keep a broken blade handy, you can drill a really tiny one, use the broken bit to manually extend the hole a bit, and technically only cut holes the thickness of the blade itself.

F-bomb pattern available in the library. I resized these to fit two to a page, which seemed to work out well.

As Bill said, the wood varies. Generally, though, you can try to dig your thumbnail in to see how hard the wood is...if you leave an indention, its probably lighter wood like pine. I find that even the broken slats make for some good signs, or even flags, the jagged edges give it that beaten-up-weathered-rustic look. Even if you don't cut something you're going to post on Etsy for thousands of dollars, every cut is a good cut if you learn something from it.