What Next?

We are planning our next project.  We like playing with the EL wire, so we think we are going to try a another sign.  Here are our ideas.  Let us know which you think we should do next.

Lighthouse

 Kokopelli

saloon sign

saloon sign #2

Birch Bay

Crabs

Tiki 2

Let There Be Light!

We have just almost finished the TIKI. The last step that we need to do is to make the teeth blink and make the eyes blink. The EL-wire will take longer then we thought to get here to finish the TIKI because of Chinese New Year. 

Measure Once Cut Twice!

We almost finished wiring TIKI. The problem is we did not have enough wire. M says that we may have been shorted on the EL-wire. Next time we should measure what we get. Other then the last touches we need to make it looks pretty good. What we are going to do is order more RED EL-wire for us to finish what we were doing. We are going to make the teeth blink as well as the inside of the eyes.

Nailed it, Wired it and Hot Glued It!

EL-wire comes into progress. We have just started putting on the EL-wire to make our TIKI come alive.
TOOLS:

• heat gun
• hot glue gun
• hammer
• utility knife

MATERIALS:

•  #15x1-1/2inch finishing nails
• glue sticks
• EL-wire(the most important thing you will be needing)

We used the nails to stretch the wires between the nails to keep them strait.
Its a little chilly in M's workshop and the EL-wire is kind of thick and wants to keep the coil shape that it came in. So we used the heat gun to make the wire more flexible. A heat gun is basically a much more hot blow drier.

 
We had to glue the EL-wire to the piece of wood to make it stay. We glued it by stretching the EL-wire between  two nails, and applying the hot glue wile its still tight. We glued to wired to the sheet of wood by running hot glue under the EL-wire. We didn't need hot glue on the four wires you see that are strait because there are two holes that they go through to make them strait. But we applied a little bit of glue to them anyways.

When we had to bend the wire to make the sharp corners. We used the heat gun to soften the EL-wire to make the corners work.

This is what it looks like underneath the board. We are trying to hide the EL-wire from showing on the front by going onto the backside.

Holy Holes

We have just finished drilling the holes for the EL-wire to go through. When we want to hide the wire, it will go into the hole to go behind the sheet of wood. The wire that we have is 4.3m, so we drilled 13/64 inch holes. We then drilled 11/32 inch holes for two EL-wires to go in and out of.

Carbon Tracing

We transferred this picture of the TIKI onto the piece of wood. We taped the picture of the TIKI onto the piece of plywood. Afterwords, we put the Carbon Paper underneath the pieces of paper(Carbon Paper is the same width and length of a normal piece of paper). We then did these steps:

• took a pencil and traced the pattern and overlapped the carbon paper with the image
• we had to press on the pencil hard enough to get black marks onto the piece of wood
• we had to repeat that for each and every piece of paper.(that will take FOREVER)

After we were done Tracing this is how it looked.

Carbon Paper? Whats That?

Went to transfer the image to the backer, and found out kids (and some clerks) don't have a clue what carbon paper is .  Finally found some at staples.  Now "m" will tell you how we transferred the image to the backer.

Learning how to Use Blogger

Figured out how to have two authors on the blog.  So now all the post I do are posted by "M" and all my daughters post are posted by "m" rather then doing everything on my daughters account.

A Blank Canvas

Next we had to build a backing for the EL-wire. We chose to mount the wire directly on to the backing rather than having it raised because where it was going to be mounted it could get bumped a lot.


Materials:
- 1 piece of 1/4 inch plywood 24 x 48 inches
- 2 8 foot 1x2
- nails or staples

First we cut a 1x2 into 2 48 inch lengths. We notched the ends of each of these pieces( M says he will tell me what these notches are for later).

Then we mounted these boards onto the plywood. We then cut two pieces of 1x2 to fit between the previous 2 pieces and mounted them.

We then painted the boards Yellow. M says that you would normally paint it black, but we wanted it the same same color as the cabin, so it wouldn't be as noticeable during the day.



m

Paper TIKI

We printed the picture of the TIKI on to 20 sheets of paper. Then I taped them together.

This is where the 4 inch grid helps. we made sure that all the squares were 4 inches apart.

m

The design

OK, We decided on the design we were going to do.   We have started to go "tiki" at the cabin, so we decided to go with a big TIKI for our first project.  I couldn't draw a straight line if I had to so I use the computer for doing my drawings.  I've been using Autocad for 25 something years so that is my drawing program of choice (actually Intellicad 2000... an 12 year old clone of Autocad).  I suppose any drawing package would do. I added a 4 inch  grid to making thing easier in the next step.

We chose to make the tiki  24 inches by 48 inches.  This is much larger than we can print on a single sheet of paper, so we had to do tile printing.  Although we could do this with our printer driver, it would waste a lot of paper because it cand only do 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 or 5x5 sheets.  We used a program call Poster Utility @ http://posterprinter.sourceforge.net/ to do the tiling.

Next m is going to print and tape together the pages.

M

The EL-wire is here

This is 20m of the EL-wire. It arrived a couple days ago. You can get this EL-wire in different colors. Its good for making Tacky things. I LIKE BRIGHT LIGHTS!!

Anyhow, dad was a little disappointed they sent the wrong wire. But he said they were really good about it. They are going to send another 10m of BLUE wire for FREE!!!

m

Here we go

OK, me (Dad or M) and my daughter (m) decided to give this blogging stuff a try,  and maybe do some Instructibles and stuff too.  We figured this might be a good father and daughter project. 

Our family has a history of liking large tacky light displays.  My Grandfather (m's Great Grandfather) used to decorate 10 acres with a ton of lights (ice cream buckets and all) .  So we figured we start with tacky light type things.

Anyhow, we've been seeing this EL-wire stuff for a while and thought we could do some cool projects with it.  We found a place that seemed to have some good deals on the wire and inverters so we ordered some to see how it would go.

M