Say Cheese

You may remember a post a few days ago, if not here's the link Anticipation, where I was working on a new project for a friends birthday.  Well there birthday has been and gone, it was a great party and today I finally finished the present.

She loves cheese, so I had a vision of a cheese plate, the idea was a wood disc with a mosaic in the middle of a red V (her man is a mad St.George Illawarra Dragons Rugby fan).

 
I started with a disc of unknown wood picked up somewhere at sometime I don't remember.  It is probably some kind of Eucalypt.  It was already round, well sort off, so I just trued the blank with a rough gouge and smoothed with a scraper.  I had attached with a faceplate so flattened of the front.

As I wanted to inlay it with the mosaic I removed a centre recess 8mm deep leaving a rim.    I then finished the edge and sanded to 1500grit before applying some Shellawax.

I removed the disc from the lathe, sanded the back (it was already flat).  Next step was to assemble the mosaic.  Unfortunately it looked bad, really bad, unbelievably bad.  My concept was all wrong.  Due to the hard nature of the wood I thought I would leave as is, but first there were a lot of  wholes to fill (a mixture of epoxy resin and coffee grounds should do the trick).  This could take a while, fill, sand, repeat.

I was worried about protecting the wood, then it hit me! Why not use a glass panel to protect the wood?  A quick call to the local glass shop and they could see no problems and the glass was ordered.  If I had known I was going to do this from the start I would have made the recess 250mm not 246mm wide and probably 6 or 10mm deep to match the glass, however 6mm left only a small 2mm lip, which could easily be fixed.

The glass arrived today and luckily I had measured right and it fit snugly, but easily removed for cleaning.  I remounted the wood to the face plate and sanded and applied shellawax again for a great shiny finish.

Now I just hope they like it!