the thing looks great....gotta get me the some of them sticks....Mike you did one heck of a great job...I like it....a lot..[cl
Thank you very much Sarg.! I think it turned out pretty good but I am easily my own biggest critic. I am looking forward to improving at this.
I thought I would pass the specifics on to you guys in case anyone wanted to take a stab at this themselves. Obviously I am not a pro at this. I did quite a bit of research to see what was working for other guys and it was surprising to see how many different techniques people use.
Here's what I used: I originally ordered Cratex brand rubberized sticks from Artco Tools (
artcotools.com). They were out of Cratex sticks in the size I wanted so they substituted Matz brand, part number MZP10C. If you Google either Cratex or Matz sticks you'll find 'em. I used a 1/2" layout on my piece so I ordered 5/8" diameter sticks so the swirls would overlap well. The sticks come 6" long and in various grits, I used course.
Here's what I did: I cut about 2" off of the end of the 6" stick and chucked it up in my drill press. The end wasn't quite flat so I squared it by running the drill press and slowly bringing the stick down against a file that I laid flat on the drill press table. The aluminum was a 16 gauge piece that I pulled out of the cut-offs bin at my supplier's. It had a few scratches on it so I ran a vibratory sander with 220 paper across it. A few things I read said the aluminum should be polished so I did with some Mothers mag polish. A few unpolished practice pieces resulted in better swirls so I think I may not polish the next one I do. I laid out an evenly spaced 1/2" grid on the face with a pencil which proved difficult to see so I'll use a fine felt tip pen next time. I used a test piece to experiment with the drill press' rpms and found that 1,660 did well so I went with that. Initially I set the depth stop on the drill press but eventually just free handed it. From there I burned-in the first row inside the 1/2" box, the second row on the line separating the 1/2" box and so on.
Here's what I'll do different next time: Although it may result in a less shiny finish, I probably won't polish the aluminum. The test swirls on the unpolished aluminum looked better. Throughout the process, the stick's surface seemed to fluctuate leaving inconsistent marks. Occasionally I had to "dress" the end by bringing it down onto a file laying across the drill press table. As I said above, I'll lay out my grid with something darker than a pencil next time. I think with a little fine tuning and a lot of practice I may get decent at this. Go try it!