Thirst Aid Station

Last Christmas my brother moved and I got the idea to get him a wall mounted bottle opener for his new flat. I found a nice bear head shaped opener online and decided to build the wooden mounting plate myself. DHL had something to say about that and I had a really hard time retrieving things from their delivery stations. I got them eventually, just not in time for Christmas.

So the Christmas gift got replaced on short notice and this lay around until my brother's birthday drew near.

After engraving the pattern, it really did ... not pop as much as I had hoped. Luckily, you can always try again and fail better. Or at least differently...

Basically I just drew inspiration from some pics online for the image. After sketching it out on blue tape, I engraved it with a rotary tool, but it looked mediocre. Next try was to burn the outlines in with an old soldering iron, which worked way better.

Next I placed a 20kg or so magnet which I still had lying around in the lower end of the wooden plate and glued it in with epoxy.

I then masked the area around the cross in the middle and stained it with some teak wood stainer which I had from other projects. It turned out suboptimal since it spilled below the masking tape in some areas. A bit of scratching with a cutter knife fixed that.

After that is was mainly a question of sanding and oiling the entire thing.

The finished product