7 – Let’s make some jazzy stuff!

Step 7 –Let’s make some jazzy stuff!

The safety note : avoid putting your finger into the blade or near the hand screw that attaches the blade to the plunger; wear safety goggles, think safe.
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Ok so here we go. Scrounge up some boards of wood. I recommend starting with nice thin bits and seeing how you go. As you go to thicker and harder woods you may notice the motor straining a bit… That is expected, it is just a poor little sewing machine motor. What helps massively is to put some bee’s wax on the blade. Particularly if you find it is slowing during tight curves, this is great stuff as it stops the edges of the blade binding on the wood. To apply, make some cuts to heat up the blade and just wipe a bit on – it should melt and cover the whole blade straight away.

Using this method I have found it to work well for thicknesses up to about 10mm (of solid oak). If you want to go crazy you could look out for, say a 1/4 horse power motor, bolt it to the side and transfer the drive using a belt to the hand turn wheel. I didn’t think it strictly necessary – but we will see how long this motor lasts ;) To improve its chances it is important that you take your foot off the gas the second you get a hint of a complete stall – It will burn out shortly after if you keep feeding it power.

To make wooden designs, you can simply cut away, making a pattern of your own design on the fly. Or you can pencil a design onto the wood and cut round that. Another option is to draw out your design on paper and stick that to the face of the wood with glue or double sided tape. Yet another option is to print out super elaborate designs that you make or download on the computer, and stick them on.

Like the things you can draw with regular art media, your options of things to sew-scroll are endless. Have fun with it!

A bunch of so called ‘off-cuts’… Lets get busy! In amoungst them is an aged to ‘silver’ cut from an old oak post – this once supported a crash barrier behind our house. (The nice council workers saved them for me when replacing them with steel ones).

First testing, draw on a pattern and cut along the line.

Being hippy alternative types we don’t have a Christmas tree, we have a ironically large money tree, that we decorate. What better to hang on it than some teak wood Christmas trees?

For this one I tried drawing on paper and sticking it on with double sided tape.

I like the natural aged silver, but made the schoolboy error, by making the delicate long thin stalk run across the grain. It hasn’t snapped yet but is unnecessarily weak.