58 Signs for a Garage Sale Experiment

all right so i have a an issue with hoarding sheet sheet goods plywood mdf if it's more than one foot square i don't really get rid of it i just stack it to the side because i have a cnc machine and it's just a perfect sign maker for random scraps and off cuts so my pile of offcuts got really large and i now have an opportunity to use them all this tomorrow actually it's friday when i'm recording this saturday is a community yard sale as a community we got together and advertised in the newspaper i'm surprised people still read the newspaper but we're having a community community yard sale so everyone's going to have their own individual yard sales but trying to attract as many people as possible and this community has done that many years in a row minus 2020 to try and get a lot of people to come for yard sales anyway so that's the opportunity to get rid of a bunch of scrap wood but it's also the opportunity to do a lot of testing and figure out what works because i've made a lot of signs as gifts everybody likes a quick little sign as a gift uh decorative item but i haven't had the opportunity to do like a mass experiment with sizes types of decorations like the actual content on the sign finishes that are used the the way that the finish is applied makes the difference whether it's distressed or not and then also if it is finished at all or if it doesn't have a finish anyway there's a lot of different options to consider when making stuff like this and i think that having the opportunity to batch out a bunch of stuff is a good experiment to gain some information so as you can see behind me there's 58 signs on here now i'm not going to show you every single one of them because there's two things you don't talk about on the online and that is religion and politics and i made these to cater to my audience i live in the southern bible belt so guess what most of those are religion and politics uh guns and jesus as a as a friend of mine said so i'll show you some of them uh but we're gonna go through i've got a list of a couple things to talk about as far as uh some options and then tomorrow's going to come and pass and then i'll follow up after the yard sale to see what sold better what people were more interested in and hopefully have a little bit better information to to present as far as this project goes if you're making just a one-off sign then make whatever you want but when you're batching out a bunch of stuff it really makes sense to make the sizes as streamlined as possible so mdf is my favorite material for for signs just because how easy it is to cut and how crisp and clean it can be so 12 by 12 is is the best size in my opinion for a full sheet of mdf because you can maximize that entire sheet because mdf has a full one inch extra in the width and length on the panel so 49 by 97 inches instead of a full instead of an exact four foot by eight foot so you can use a thin curve saw blade or you know full curve and just be very accurate to get this down to 12 inch by 12 inch and maximize the entire sheet so the majority of these are 12 inch by 12 inch and i wanted to reduce set up time as much as possible so i tried to stay with at least one of the dimensions being 12 inches long and i had a bunch that worked out to be 12 inch by 10 and a half and then i had a bunch that were 12 inch by eight if i'm not mistaken something like that and then i had a few that were 12 inch by uh i forget this one but as you can see i'm keeping this one dimension and that sometimes means your designs have to be either horizontal or vertical it changes your designs but by staying with one dimension that's the same it drastically reduces setup time on the machine what about materials we have mdf plywood and then carving solid wood there's pros and cons to each one the pro with carving solid wood is in my opinion it looks the best the the cons to it is it's the most time consuming because uh you have to make sure it's all joint you have to make sure it's all square all sides it's much more prep work with a solid piece of wood plywood is my least favorite option to carve signs and it used to be my first i used to think well i've got all these plywood scraps i'll start carving up all these signs to give out and that was just the only option i went to at first realized that i had a bunch no matter what bit that i'm using uh most plywoods they'll leave you with little fuzzies here and there that you have to sand off with like 320 grit sandpaper then edge treatment if it's not a quality piece of plywood then you'll have fuzzies and irregularities on the edge and you may even have voids like this one does right here this one has a little void right here and if it's on the edge this is going to be hanging on a wall like so it's not going to be an issue at all majority people aren't going to care but what if that void was say right here well it would look really bad and it's unpredictable in that regard so plywood is actually one from my first option when i first got a cnc machine to my least favorite option now and if i'm batching out a bunch of stuff or if i want the easiest route i'm going with and and also i don't care about having wood grain as a texture i'm going with mdf mdf the pros are it is it carves so nice so perfect every single time and as so long as you do some type of uh finish treatment to it it looks pretty darn good the majority of people who buy these decorative little signs they could care less if they see wood grain whatever they just want the overall vibe of the sign right like this person is going to buy this sign because of the subject matter not because of the material itself so material matters if it's something really nice i'm going to go with a solid wood like ash ash is my favorite wood to carve if it's something that i want to batch out i'm going with mdf shape and hanging shape and hanging those goes hand in hand and i have two different strategies for that whether it's it's an engineered panel it's one strategy versus solid wood it's another strategy so all engineered panels mdf plywood um or thin glue ups like i'm gluing up together like a cutting board but it's super thin and i'm just stuck with that dimension like three quarters of an inch or less then i'm going to have the strategy of it just hangs on the wall everything that i cut i cut a keyhole slot on the backside just because it's one less thing to purchase you can cut a keyhole slot even with just a regular plunge router and a straight guide i make mine four inches long it's way longer than what's necessary i always make them horizontal and always put it in the center if you make it four inches long you don't have to worry about getting the machine or your plunge router you don't have to worry about everything getting dead nuts perfect you can just eyeball center and that's fine because four inches gives you plenty enough leeway on either side to make sure that the nail that this is hanging on is going to be centered on the object so i always make mine four inches long everything that i cut regardless of if it's hang on the wall or sit on the table they always have a keyhole slot in the back for that option but like i said some of them are sized like this to just sit on a table did i say hang on a table set on a table anyway um i'll go to my scrap bin and find blocks of wood like this like this other side's got some curl and a decorative anyway this is going to look pretty nice when some finish is applied to it but i'll mill these blocks down to square six sides keeping the thickness as thick as possible then i'll just set these to the side and then when somebody has a child or someone for example this this particular size right here is great if somebody has a child to keep a template a nice decorative template where you can have the name the birth weight the length the time the date you can have all the stats of the child's birth in a template and pop this on the machine cut it out real quick so it's catered to that particular person give it as a gift and everyone that i've given something like this to has been super appreciative of it they love it and then they end up most always setting it on the dresser and the nursery so this particular size scrap wood is really really nice to keep on hand just mill it up occasionally but also if i have a bunch of material that is the size of say like a rail and style type material one two inches in width and whatever length i'll glue those together in like a cutting board blank but i'll also again try to keep the thickness as thick as possible because you can always hang it on the wall bit but if it's got a thick base to it or if it's got a wide base to the material then it gives you the option of setting it anywhere you want to display it um i've made clocks that i thought people would hang but because they were thick enough they just set them on on an end table so that's pretty cool so two different strategies if it's sheet goods it just gets a keyhole slot in the back and you're just stuck with hanging it on the wall but solid wood try and keep them as thick as possible to give yourself a couple options regarding the edge treatment this is kind of an order of operations thing first i'll put the finish on then i will put the edge treatment on and then i'll carve this this out and the order of operations really matters there for a couple reasons number one if you are a little bit messy with your finish application i'm not saying you know allow yourself to drip all the way down the edge and get super messy but if that edge is not perfect all the way around the perimeter if you have a little bit of a puddle here or maybe just a tiny bit of a bleed over the edge if there's any little amount people's eyes are going to immediately go to that and see that irregularity it's just going to stick out like a sore thumb so when you put your finish on after the finish is done drying or whatever i come back with a round over bit and that mainly takes this edge and and makes it perfect the finish the transition from the finish to the raw material is perfect now all the way around the edge looking at this let's see i'll use this one looking at this 90 degrees to the camera let me try and move this 90 degrees to the camera you could because there's a round over here you can see a little bit of the material and it kind of adds a little bit more of a border effect without having an actual border so it's a visual as well and then it feels more finished like a finished product than uh than a straight edge to the to the to the end user now the round over is not just for finishing and and for it to feel good it actually really really does a good job of helping with loading and unloading on the machine let me bring you over there and i'll show you this is the setup to batch these out i have a series of dogs in two different directions to establish my reference corner and then i have two stop blocks which are just scrap half inch plywood with some slots cut in them and this will allow me to use a hold down knob to slide this in place and slide this in place clamp it down and this locks the material laterally so it's not going to slide anywhere there's no need to have downward pressure on the top of it when you're carving out like v carving because you're not removing any pieces of the material not making full depth cuts and also in my case the brushes of the dust shoe they put a little bit of downward pressure on this anyway so just clamping horizontally or trapping it horizontally is all that's necessary i don't have any cams or anything to uh to loosen remove and put back in place there's no need for that in this case because the fact that i put the round over uh on before carving them out that really helps with with sliding these on and off so if i did not put the round over on here i would have to loosen up these two stop blocks every single time because you have to get it absolutely perfect in order for it to fit down but what this round over does is it essentially makes the bottom edge i put the round over on the bottom edge as well it essentially makes the edges of the bottom of this piece of plywood kind of kind of like wedges so you're just wedging it in there so i'll put these two stop blocks in there really tight and then when this is done carving it's a little bit of pressure to pop this one out bring the next one in in place really quick and easy and it's just setting in place it doesn't go all the way to the table but because these bottom edges are rounded over it acts kind of like a wedge to knock it down and now it's kind of wedged in place and that little pressure that i put down on it these dogs do not mar up the edges so i've seen no problems doing this method you pop them out really fast and easy and there you go you're ready to carve rounding the edges before carving really helps in setup using scrap wood for a project like this is a very useful and productive way to get rid of that material versus say burning it or just throwing it away and it's also a great opportunity to get rid of a bunch of or use up a bunch of extra finishes that you may already have so in this case i tried to just experiment with some random stuff i have a little bit of a few of these all the brown ones are sherwin-williams bac wiping stain i have no idea what color specifically this was but it was mixed for a specific use that has come and gone so good opportunity to use this up all of the red that you'll see is this red right here is a valspar latex enamel and not this particular can but i had a little can like this that was dated 2012 on it so great opportunity to get rid of that um i all the black stuff that you'll see is total boat wet edge topside paint one part polyurethane i had extra this from a leftover from a recent project so good opportunity to continue to use it away none of what i use none of what i showed you will show you is colored with this particular stuff but i wanted to show it to you because if i'm making a solid wood piece a really nice one this is my go-to finish for it or coloring is is marsh stencil spray ink stencil ink this black covers everything phenomenally much better than paint because it's ink not paint and it dries to a beautiful matte black so i really really like this stuff it's kind of pricey but i figured i'd at least give it a shout out as a really good option and all the vibrance colors not the red that i just showed you but all the vibrant colors is just basic spray paint nothing fancy and there's a little bit of a technique to spraying this stuff so how was it applied well spray paint i also used a roller for all of the black and all of the white this particular top side polyurethane paint i didn't do a good job with applying it because i thought i was just going to slap it on there and and kind of distress it but i ended up not liking the way that i applied it so uh for the black ones the majority of them i either top coated a couple times or tried to distress it so that added labor to the to the task all of the white stuff is general finishes snow white water-based milk paint really good product i like this stuff it covers really really well in one coat and i rolled all of it on and then for a couple of the different ones the the red one specifically i used cardboard to scrape it on and what that does is it gives a little bit of a a pattern as you're scraping it through rather than a brush and you can see it very well in some of the examples that i'll show you scraping it with just regular cardboard another quick tip here whatever i quit buying brushes to apply glue instead for the past six months or so i've started just cutting up cardboard boxes basically everybody nowadays gets a bunch of cardboard boxes and uh just cut them up and have a bunch of scrap pieces in various different sizes pretty thin wider pieces whatever you want to apply glue well i use that same method to apply some finishes here very inexpensive way to uh to apply stuff and with a material that we basically have for free anyway uh so also as i was done with the projects some of them i top coated the majority of them i top coated with shellac just to kind of even things up a little bit and that that made a difference on a couple of different materials so this in my hvlp setup over here is sealcoat shellac and i keep seal coat shellac in that particular gun at all times i have not cleaned that gun and i don't know a year six months a year year and a half i don't know when's the last time i cleaned that gun because i only use it for sealcoat shellac shellac is the finish itself denatured alcohol is what it is dissolved into it's the vehicle to distribute that shellac so you can actually apply it with a brush or spray it but shellac is not a layered type finish it burns into or bond or kind of dissolves into the layer below it so you're essentially making a much thicker layer than like polyurethane where you're just stacking layers because denatured alcohol dissolves the shellac i don't clean that out because as i'm spraying the next the next use you know a month down the road two weeks down the road the the the denatured alcohol kind of cleans it out and and makes makes it continue to spray quite well so i've never had an issue with not cleaning that gun so long as i keep it dedicated for shellac there's a difference on on the final appearance spraying a top coat of slack and not spraying a top coat of shellac so let me bring in closer and we'll talk about all the different finishes as they're done keep in mind that the human eye can detect drastic differences in these three pieces whereas the camera sensor is not really doing that good of a job to to detect the small subtleties so everything that i'm going to show you is much more drastic in person than it is coming through the camera lens so we have here is three different signs the same shape there's no shellac on this one a light dusting of shellac on this one and then a heavy coat or multiple coats of shellac to make sure that every bit of the mdf got covered with shellac and you have three different results so first off there's no shellac on this particular one so the mdf all the way around the edges the inside the carving it looks more muted more pastel like and the color on top this red also looks a little bit more muted a little bit more pastel like this one i have a light dusting of shellac so a wide fan pattern and a that's all the shellac that i put on here and it's a drastic difference to just the color there wasn't enough to really soak into the mdf to make the mdf get darker but there was enough to just make the color pop a little bit so whether or not it's coming through on camera this one is much more muted than this one and then this one has got a lot of shellac on it more multiple coats i should say so that the mdf itself darkens up quite a bit and you can control the contrast with the with with the amount of shellac so maybe it's showing up you can see a difference in the shellac here and then also inside of all these these two are the exact same vector that i use so you can kind of get a good good example of how much was soaked in and how much wasn't this is the red latex enamel and how i applied that was like i said i used cardboard to just drag it across the surface and maybe you can see the streaking in the finish it gives a it gives it a dragged pattern so it's a quick and easy way to apply it that also as adds some visual interest in uh the the texture you can do that with all the finishes minus the stain the stain just soaks in i used a rag to apply this as much as evenly as i could and that's basically what you get with a stain on mdf it kind of looks even so that's it for these examples these are both plywood and you can see a drastic difference once again this one's got shellac on it this one does not this one looks much more muted much more dull and natural this one looks more more finished i only sprayed a couple of the pieces of plywood with shellac because it in my opinion it just makes everything well let's see if we can look straight on it it makes everything blend too much because the the lines inside the plywood with this brown finish kind of kind of blended too much whereas in this without a finish looks much more contrasty and i like this look a lot better so for plywood i'll probably if at all possible not spray shellac going forward now with the black this is both the same black uh total bolt wet edge and i experimented with distressing i thought sanding it would distress it and look at a heck of a lot better but this one i think i distressed a little bit too far so maybe not to the camera but to the eyes i think i distressed this one a little bit too far what i was using to distress them was a sander random orbit sander with 150 grit sandpaper going back and forth i think this one i did a grid in both directions and that ended up being a little bit too much in my opinion this i didn't distress did i distress maybe i i see swirl marks so i did hit it with the sander just very very lightly to take off um to to even even the finish out i guess a little bit but i didn't try to distress this one at all and it looks pretty darn even and black but um i guess it is distressed a little bit i just kept a lot of the color there didn't go as aggressive with it so two drastically different looks with the same same finish and again both of these got shellac on top there's too many lights in my shop there's too much glare everywhere but you can see the definite difference here i prefer to not distress hardly at all if any uh versus distressing too much because there's some signs that i made over there that they're just distressing was just a little bit too much it's very easy to go a little bit too far and the design blends too much with it this looks better in my opinion and now my favorite is this white if you go to a hobby lobby especially here in the south you'll see a slew of signs that have this white and brown those particular colors distressed and it's just extremely popular where i live this is the sherwin-williams snow white milk paint and i sanded it with the same amount with the random orbit sander these these have a little bit more distressing than that solid black one but they this color scheme this combo looks really really great and all these have shellac on them as well white and mdf really contrast really really well uh this is my favorite by far this is my wife's favorite by far uh everyone that i've showed these two this this color combo is the favorite so um there's that and then for all the colored ones uh i just use spray paint like i said now when i'm spraying these i put them on a lazy susan and i keep the can the nozzle of the can inside the area of the material at all times and you're not supposed to angle the gun or angle the spray when you're spraying you're really not supposed to do that you're supposed to keep the angle of the spray perpendicular to the surface at all times but i break that rule of going away from the edge on purpose so that i basically guarantee i won't accidentally spray the edge of the of the material so i'll keep my hand inside at all times doing the top half working my way down spin it around and do the other half this way as well just guarantees all the colors inside and not on the edge difference between these two is obviously the color but the difference is this one does not have shellac and this one does i've noticed on some of these colors uh especially if you're doing like vibrant colors like like these are the pastel option or the not having the top coat in my opinion looks way better than once i put color on it and it kind of makes it really pop with colors i prefer the pastel type of look so this one's got shellac you can see the dark mdf this one's got no shellac whatsoever i prefer this one my wife prefers this one this is a good example of where you distress making a big difference on the the overall the final design of the sign so the same red application of finish the same you know dragging the finish same amount of shellac top coat but all of this the majority of the distressing here is along the perimeter which is better much better in my opinion this one the majority of the distressing is in the middle and that really messes with the visuals on this one so from from this angle they kind of you know they both look alright whatever but this one if you get it in the right light or get it in the right angle this this word right here more just really just fades away into the distressing and i probably won't be able to convey that on camera but this one says coffee coffee more coffee more is kind of like in a rope text and this really fades away so this was a bad use of this vector on this particular piece of mdf and also uh what really made me realize that the majority of the distressing should be around the perimeter so that the subject matter is never lost in the distressing all right a couple of takeaways from the garage sale it's a couple days later i've got all of the signs gone and i already brought in some maple for my next project but the day of the garage sale was brutally hot typical you know mid-summer day in mississippi it was mid to high 90 degrees with like 85 percent humidity not a cloud in the sky it was brutal we opened the garage door at 6 30 in the morning the first person showed up at 6 45 a.m and by 11 a.m we were all like heat exhausted we shut down nobody else was doing the yard sale thing so i was about four and a half ish hours for the whole yard sale uh i had 58 of them and sold 33 of the signs during the garage sale and the remaining 25 i sold to a friend of mine who has a booth at a local resale store so i don't know as far as the retail performance because i did not sell mine at what i would consider a retail value but that information will continue to come in as he sells them going forward um so what did i sell them for two dollars each which is nothing it's absolutely nothing it's doubled up as far as the materials cost but it's not even a kick in the bucket as far as the labor cost but my goal was not necessarily to generate revenue for this i wanted to generate data figure out what did best so my takeaways are white went the fastest by far the white signs were gone first which is kind of expected the religious themed ones i'm in the bible belt so they went the fastest which is kind of expected and the worst performing which was unexpected was all the coffee signs that i cut barely any of the coffee ones sold and as i'm looking around watching people interact with the signs barely anybody picked up any of the coffee ones or went through some of the coffee ones so that was kind of a shock um those are the biggest takeaways though from my little mini experiment here like i said i'm going to continue to get data in from my friend who's selling them at a retail store resale store at a retail price figure out what all of that ends up being but that's it just figured i'd do a little quick follow-up you guys take care and i'll talk to you in the next video

Channel: Jay Bates 2 - Vlog and Non Project Videos

Views: 8,240

Keywords: jayscustomcreations, update, woodworking, jaybates, vlog

Id: _Blx9B46alU

Length: 28min 18sec (1698 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021