Tilting at Windmills

After having devoted 25 years to the sign business, Joe Rees of Cape Craft Signs (Eastham, MA) said, “After all this, I constantly find myself trying new things I’ve never done before. I always want to stretch our abilities and challenge the status quo.”

The Eastham symbol, the windmill (reportedly constructed by Thomas Paine in 1780, the mill was moved to Eastham, in 1793), provided such a learning opportunity. The town’s 40 x 56-in. sign’s face comprises ¾-in.-thick PVC with an inset, raised, ¾-in.-thick HDU overlay.

Rees planned to relief-carve the windmill intact, but he quickly realized the job would be simpler if he carved only the windmill body and made the vanes separately.

After the body and trees were carved, he traveled to the hobby store to buy copper tubing and rod to form the vanes, which he would solder together. The clerk, a model-building fanatic and local windmill expert, suggested square stock would prove more authentic and pointed Rees to the appropriately scaled maple and balsa stock. Back at the shop, with Crazy Glue and an X-acto knife, Rees assembled them quickly, coated them with two rounds of West System epoxy for protection and painted them to match. He liberally applied epoxy on their backsides for a permanent bond.

The chamfered edge surrounding the inset panel is decorated with 23k goldleaf, and the flowing banner is a raised, 1-in.-thick-HDU appliqué. All copy was V-carved.

Advertisement

Rees and partner Dick Clark (they’ve recently added more help), who completes most of the handcarving with chisels, work in a post-and-beam barn behind Dick’s house. Rees said, “We’ve optimized it to be very efficient. The only problem is it’s a little too small to wedge a CNC machine into the mixture, but we’ve groomed a close source to subcontract that work.”