anvil_davidstar

Checkering, post refinish....

Published: October 26th 2021, 8:57:02 pm

The party that sanded and oiled this stock did a beautiful job. Right up until he pulled out a checkering tool........

This is a very high grade Superposed, engraved, 32 line per inch checkering. As is normal during any correctly sanded refinish, the edges of the checkering pattern were damaged and needed a clean up to remove this damage and accumulated finish. The fun starts here and continues to photo 2. There is a black pencil line drawn across the upper third of the pattern, as viewed from the master line plane. I did this to illustrate an optical illusion that screws with the eyes, and it has to do with the Z axis. 

What we are really doing here is placing 2 dimensional art, on a 3 dimensional surface. Photo 3, we see the same line, from 45 degrees off of the axis in the first photo. The same line appears to be bent in several directions. Attempting to straighten this line when viewed from THIS angle will result in a mess. So much so, that the completed job was put out to the customer with the mistakes sanded off.

It gets worse. The single border seen here is actually mullered elsewhere, and left the bounds of the available pattern confines. Yikes.

Photo 4 is after the cleanup. Had to chase the other side (same border attempt), as well as the entire fore end, just to make it all match. In all, what should have been a 45 minute post finish cleanup turned into 6+ hours of work, and a pissed off customer.

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