Project of the Day : Cigar Pokers

[shilala]

I know everybody and their brother has made these along the way, and there have been a ton of different designs. Recently a friend asked if I'd crank some out for him, so I thought I'd give it a shot and put my own twist on them.

There's not a lot to say, so I'll do it quick and get to the pics.
They're made out of quartersawn red oak, and the board I picked is pretty highly figured. Quartersawn lumber usually shows some nice figuring and this piece has some curly to it, almost checkered. It makes it a bit more interesting.

I painted the lettering with a gold pinstriping paint.
I stained the oak with some cherry stain which really has no color at all. It just brings out the grain a bit and gives the oak a "wet" look.
I filled the Cohiba logo with a bar epoxy, then sanded everything out to a 400 grit. That was just to take out any scratches and the little bit of slopped around epoxy. Then I gave this Cohiba poker a couple more coats of stain, dried it, polished it with carnauba wax, then used a liquid "Ice" wax on top of that.

I'm not going to use the bar epoxy on any of the other pokers, this particular poker was for Sexy Dave and I wanted to take it up a notch. The rest will get polyurethane.

I've done 3 logos for other projects, Partagas, Cohiba, and most recently, LGC. I just smallered those logos and used them for these pokers. The logos and paint really worked out great.
What I do there is carve the letters first, paint down in the carved areas, then take off maybe 1/32" from the whole board. That takes up any paint that's not in the carving groove and saves me a ton of work.

That's all I can really say about that.
Pics...