If you recall my set of hand sawn from a log cedar coasters, Kathy asked what I was going to do with the larger log. At first I thought “large coasters” but that’s kind of stupid (I guess some huge beer stein, but really?) and then the idea came to me: recipe trivets
John is one of the world’s leading authorities on mushroom poisoning (he’s boarded in Emergency medicine and is a toxicologist) and as an outgrowth of that raises shiitakes which are sold to all sorts of local restaurants. I said, hey why don’t we make trivets for your favorite recipes for produce from the farm. This is just a test (and is a recipe from a book), but seemed a good test, and now she’s going to gather her recipes.
This is a little over 0.5" thick (hand sawn with a bow saw as the log is too big for my 10" miter saw), and required me to remove the tray (see the tutorial on how to do that if you are new to all this).
Spent some time working on the layout, and decided on 30%/300 after some tests on some scrap. Man does this look amazing in person. I didn’t know it was possible to engrave this sharply on natural wood… Now I did prep the surface with 220 grit on my porter-cable random orbit to get is smooth enough to take such tight engraves.
The other key item is at 30/300 I get no condensation of spew, which is amazing in such an oily wood. It is super clean (no after work at all) and I didn’t use masking.
Hello! I was wondering if you could recommend a tweek to the setting I used on a 0.5in piece of cedarwood. I used your settings above (but with masking) and they worked great except for the really fine details in the script font. I don’t want to change the parts that came out well too much, but I just need the fine details in the script to show a bit more. See attached picture.
I’m thinking if I up the power to 40% that should do the trick; what do you think? Or up the lines per inch instead? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Not too bad for my first time using cedar! I just wish it had a bit more detail on the script words…like yours!!
