Monday, August 27, 2012

Working Harder - Not Smarter... wait... what?

I'm putting together some Flemish string boards to have available for sale at upcoming events I'll be at. At the SCA event, Great Western War in October I'll be giving ongoing Flemish bowstring demonstrations in my booth. Having the string board available for folks to purchase only makes sense.
The back of these boards has a bit of helpful information printed on paper and laminated to the board. When I did the lamination a bit of ink smeared on the paper, but it wasn't too bad so I went ahead and did all of them. When I brushed on the first coat of protective finish a little more ink smeared, it didn't look good but I went ahead and did all of them.
Well, afterwards I looked at these things and decided I'd need to start all over again, they looked horrible. I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to sand the finish and paper off with some 60 grit sandpaper and a vibratory sander.


It turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.
The lamination glue and the finish I used over the paper combined to gum up the sandpaper into unusability very quickly.

 
 
Trying to figure out how I was going to get this stuff taken off I decided to try the trusty Shinto Rasp. Bob's your uncle, we got going in the right direction.
 

The Shinto Rasp took things down pretty fast and without the blade getting gummed up. The long length of the rasp let me use it almost like a surface plane and I had no difficulties keeping the board flat with no spots where the tool dug into the wood.
From this point it was quick work to use a cabinet scraper for a final touch-up before hitting the surface with the vibrating sander.


Yeah, the idea is to work smarter, not harder. But occasionally when things don't work out as you want them to you've got to do a little bit more work to get things headed back in the right direction.

Lessons learned here are:
When the ink smears... STOP!
The Shinto Rasp rocks!



Happy archery, and Flemish bowstring making!