I rarely get to weld an entire armature for a project, but occasionally I have that privilege. With everyone else busy on all the diverse projects on the go and the shop crammed full to the max, there was just enough room for me to squeeze into one small area by the big shop doors. This project is vertical and doesn’t take up much floor square footage. It is the ‘Aunt Kelsey’s Apple Tree Swing’ sign for Vala’s Pumpkin Patch in Nebraska. In record time, I designed and routed the sign faces on our new ShopSabre CNC router. This machine is much faster than our old one! I then glued them up over a sturdy welded steel armature. Then, we cut the 1/4” thick steel base on the FastCut CNC plasma. I raided the scrap bin for the structural steel as the apple tree trunk needed to be twisty and gnarly, and we save our short bits for projects like this. Then, it was on to forming and welding up the pencil rod framework. Tomorrow morning, Matt will start attaching the diamond lath in readiness for the sculpting process, which may be started later this week. Stay tuned…