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Maple letter openers
Ken Grunke

Maple letter openers

A few of us over at the Woodturner's Resource forums were playing around with designs for a wooden letter opener, and this is what I ended up with. You can see that forum thread here:
http://www.woodturnersresource.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1213567952/0

These Maple openers are 6" long, and turned from 3/4" square stock. Finish is wipe-on Polyurethane. The profile for the blade was turned, then waste cut away with the bandsaw and shaping done with a belt sander, carving knife, file, and sandpaper to give a blade thickness of about 3/16".

The signature is a chemical transfer from a printing on regular paper from my old laser printer, hooked up to my Mac.
Very nice Ken, but I don't understand how you acheived the signature on the blade.
 
Hi Gary, there's two ways of doing that, starting with a reverse printing from any laser printer.
The first is heat transfer, and Penn State offers an electric hand-held transfer tool used to iron the ink through the paper onto most any surface. Follow this link:
http://www.pennstateind.com/store/egtool.html

The other way is chemical transfer, using a solvent to moisten the backside of the paper and moderate pressure for about a minute. On another forum, Ron Sardo posted that Xylene works well and perhaps other solvents. I had no Xylene but had some liquid varnish remover that worked fine. Just a light dabbing on the backside of the paper is all you need--too much, and it smears.
 

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Ken Grunke
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Canon Canon PowerShot G2
Aperture
ƒ/8
Focal length
12.5 mm
Exposure time
1/250 second(s)
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Filename
letter_openers07a.jpg
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Date taken
Sun, 29 June 2008 5:19 AM
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