Post #796870 by leevigraham on Sun, Aug 18, 2019 4:47 AM

This weekend invloved another round of carving and burning. I got pretty effiecient and managed to knock out about 8m of trim on a couple of hours just before the sun went down.

Sunset is the perfect time to light a fire and burn back the trim

I tried a few different burn techniques… in the end I think the best outcome came from the hottest flame and rotating the board 45 degress so the flame travelled up throught the routing groves. I also sprayed the board with water as soon as it was out of the fire to stop the edges burning too much.

My acual goal was to frame the tapa so I woke up relatively early (I won't say what time) and got to work.

I removed the placeholder timber and started from the top to support the tapa. The center post helped spread the tapa and kept it taught without stressing it.

I also did some repairs with a waterdowned wood glue. I figured that given tapa is mulberry bark a wood glue would bind the fibres well. Hopefully ti doesn't discolour the tapa too much.

I got the tapa mounted pretty quickly so I pushed it and decided to build out the next part of the project… a thin box to hide some lighting and fake plants.

I started with a frame made from scrap.

I squared everything up with some mdf board. I planned to use the board as backing for a covering. I wanted to get some Lauhala Matting for the box but it's really exoensive in Australia and hard to find so I went to the local hardware store and found some reed privacy screen.

I really don't like the reed screen… every time I've seen it on a fence it looks cheap (it is) but I decided to take a chance and thoight that if double it over it might be ok.

The mdf board was covered with spray paint (project with my daughters) and I didn't want that to show through so I bought some cheap black weed mat and covered everything.

I stapled the reed screen on trying to make sure any gaps where filled.

I then put the two boxes back in place and sat back for a r(hum) and ginger beer.

After a little bit of "inspiration" I decided to complete the goal and add the recessed lighting. I think it worked out well