Boots and Hearts!

We work quite a bit with one particular client who does a ton of events. These are the guys that we do almost all the beer projects for.
The Thursday night go ahead was a small build for the upcoming Boots and Hearts music festival.
The clients have the ability to do a lot of stuff in-house, but they do sub out to us on lots of things as well.
They needed 3 sets of old west saloon doors for the Coors beer tent.

The first step was the center panels of the doors. These were cut on the saw from 2 sheets of 3/4" birch ply. I wanted to do individual slats, but for a number of reasons we went with ply. I also grooved the sheets with the saw to represent the slats. Jody got to work painting these while I milled up the rest of the wood.

The rails and stiles for the doors were also cut on the table saw from 2X4 and 2X6 cedar. I went with cedar specifically because it ages really nice with a wire wheel, and does it quickly!

Once all the wood was cut and rabbeted on the table saw, I set to work with the wire wheel and a rather large corded drill. All in all, it took about an hour to run through all the pieces.

By the time I had finished all the pieces with the wheel, Jody had all the center panels aged nicely! These also got a coat of satin clear. Because we have to v-carve, and paint the logo, we wanted to clear the panels to make painting the text as easy as possible!

By end of day Friday, I had all six frames fastened up, and set them off to dry. Finally, done work at 4:30! WOO-HOO!

Saturday morning had Jody tackling the paint on the frames. It was a shame to have to faux finish the real cedar, but it had to match the paint job on the center panels. Plus, the paint is a nice sliver guard for the 1000's of people that will move through these doors over the course of the 4 day festival.

While Jody was killing it in the paint department, I was running the Aspire files for the center panel logo. Each door ran approximately 28 minutes on our Techno. I slowed the machine right down to about 210 IPM to avoid as much chipping/ blowout as possible!
After the first door came off our Techno, Jody and I would get the logo filled in with paint, and by the time it was painted, the next one was ready!

Because the plywood absorbed the black acrylic paint very unevenly, it actually took 3 coats to level out. Of course, 3 coats also meant very little sanding of the v-carving as well. Paint is waaaay better than sanding any day!

First thing this morning, I headed into the shop to add a light vignette around the center panels, and do the final assembly of all 6 doors. They'll be picking these up around noon tomorrow, and it will be the first job for these guys that the driver didn't have to wait at least an hour before paint dried to load up! Maybe things are looking up!!


This was another great project, and a great turn-around time! It was super fun, and stress free!
Now that's what I'm talkin about!
8)
JWO