Blacker Lion Table Refinishing
Status: Complete
Skills: This project made use of waterjetting, woodburning, sanding, and finishing tools
Timeline: November 2019
Another Blacker lion-related project, this time to refinish a dorm table. Several other people routed, stripped, and sanded the table before this engraving project.
To get the engraving pattern, I modified the .svg file using Gimp and Inkscape to manually slice lines until the waterjet would remain intact. I tested this pattern with the shop laser cutter and realized I missed a piece along the lion’s tail. Once fixed, I exported this to a .dxf that could be sent to the waterjet. As it turns out, the shop waterjet is old and the wrong version of the .dxf will take ages to load and generate far too many additional circles (every line becomes a semicircle with a ridiculous radius). This was fixed by converting the .dxf to an older version (R12), and I cut the pattern out of scrap aluminum.
The initial goal was to try woodburning with a propane torch directly onto the bare wood table. This was impractical for several reasons, and instead I chose to trace and woodburn the pattern.
My sister was in town that weekend, and she helped with the three finishing coats on the final product. Intermediate staining steps left the table quite dark, but the finished product turned out nicely.
