Custom Rounded Letter Banks
Custom rounded letter banks is something that I had in mind from the very beginning for SandboxRanch.com but got stuck in the weeds working all the issues with developing the first batch of 28 square letter banks so I had to push this to the side temporarily.
You can actually see the first set of round letter banks in the very first video I made for SandboxRanch.com before it came into being below, notice the S, L, C, J and L? Well, yes, all scrap for many many reasons but it was a very valuable lesson so it was by no means an absolute loss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYlrz6dMwKk/
Now that I have a working and repeatable process established with the square letter banks, going back to the rounded letter banks is a breeze, there are so many issues that just no longer exist thanks to heavy investments in time and treasure.
Like everything else bank related at SandboxRanch.com, custom rounded letter banks begin life as laminated red oak boards which I make from rough sawed lumber, this adds strength and rigidity to the banks that are about to be made, which means more durability for the end-products we make with it.
There are MANY steps involved with making custom rounded letter banks, both before and after they are made at the shop on-demand, from getting the laminated slab ready to go with cleaning on both sides before the first bank is ever made to the finishing and window added to the front before shipping these out.
Now that I have my feeds and speeds dialed in for production of these custom rounded letter banks, all sorted out when I made their square variant, I can pretty much mix and match any bank on SandboxRanch.com to make them at the same time, whether they are a letter bank or a shape, another area I want to expand upon greatly in the coming years.
Here’s just a glimpse of what’s possible, a lot of show and tell!
For this specific production run, I wanted to see and hear the process of making the custom rounded letter banks, that’s how you tell if you are going too fast, slow or there are some issues with production that aren’t apparent when you have the music blaring on max and lots of other activities going on at the shop.
As the front part of the dust boot is missing, lots of chips escape, essentially, I’m removing more than half of the laminated slab I made as chips during the production of these custom rounded letter banks, and when that doesn’t end-up getting sucked out, it ends-up on the table, piles of it, all over the place at SandboxRanch.com.
Banks have been my interest for years, it started with a little loon I got when I was a kid and has evolved a lot since then now that I can make them myself.
Luckily, I have another vacuum system that I used throughout the production process to clean-up the chips that were being produced during the making of the custom rounded letter banks, so you don’t have photos and videos of just a pile of wood chips building up higher and higher until the whole job is complete.
Of course, I also made myself a loon, similar to what I had when I was a child and very much the inspiration for me getting into the custom wood banking business to begin with, way back when I was a child and going to school required going uphill both ways by foot through frozen snow.
What I really enjoy most about making this run of custom rounded letter banks is that I’m no longer producing scrap after scrap, basically, everything I make now, thanks to months and months of working out the kinks, is almost perfect right off the machine!
It still blows me away at how effortless my new CNC machine makes these banks, there are so many curves highly detailed areas where I’m carving in a very challenging wood and I’m able to do it at SandboxRanch.com as if I was cutting air with this beast of a machine.
As you review some of these older videos, you can start to see just how much has changed since I started making these banks earlier in the year.
The final step right before cutting out the outlines of these custom rounded letter banks is drilling all the holes for the screws, this alone took a very long time to sort out properly, and to think, I use to manually drill these all out myself one by one using a power drill.
After all the custom rounded letter banks are cut out, of course, I have some square letter banks and the loon in there with a square prototype, its time to get the jigsaw out and finish the cutting out process at SandboxRanch.com.
The jigsaw does an OK job of cutting out the various elements for these custom banks but I really need to make space for a proper band saw, and a big band saw at that, to make this aspect of the job a lot safer and more enjoyable.
After I employ the jigsaw on these custom rounded letter banks, the next step is routing them on my router table and then after that, making the matching front windows for all these banks.
The most enjoyable part of making all these banks is the diversity, I’m not just making the same thing each and every time, even if the letters are shapes are the same, they are all unique like a fingerprint, with their own color variations, textures and wood grain.
With every “new shape”, whether letter or animal, I always make a MDF prototype first, just to make sure all the endless design work performed previously is accurate within about 1/16″ so the screws fit in properly and the outline is beautiful.
There was a lot of testing between CNC machines, power tools and process in order to get SandboxRanch.com to this point, but all that hard work was well worth it, the quality right out of the machine is amazing, you can see below, this is straight out before any very fine tuning is performed.
Once the MDF checks out, then it’s time to cut out the custom rounded letter bank windows, this batch all called for clear acrylic, so that’s what I cut except for one square letter bank, which was a transparent blue.
Below is what this run of custom banks looks like with the still protective masking on the various acrylics used, if you have a very keen eye, you’ll notice none of the “C”s made it to this step yet, that’s because I screwed-up the design file and thus, made a C rounded letter bank that didn’t meet my specs.
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