Baptismal Font Complete

The Baptismal Font is complete just in time for Easter!  I knew it would happen, and I'm very happy with the results...even if I had to make two of them to get it right.

While making version 1.0 of the font, I had a slip up and ended up having to re-cut a series of joints on the box joint jig (a.k.a. finger joint jig).  If you're not sure what I'm talking about, check out parts 1 and 2 of this series.  This meant I had to re-cut all eight pieces shorter to match and the whole font was just too small.

It was meant to be, though, because my hardwood dealer was all out of the clear maple that I was using on the first font and I decided to go with the slightly more expensive curly maple.  And MAN, that stuff looks GREAT!  I was very happy with the figure of the wood and it took the Danish Oil quite well.  

I also had some scraps of curly maple in the shop left over from an American Flag that I made for a customer, so I was able to easily make the trim pieces for the top of the font.  For these pieces, I cut the pieces on a 45 degree angle slightly longer than the length of each side.  I then glued them on one at a time always aligning the right side of the new board with the left side (the long side) of the previous board.  This basically made the top look like a big 8-tooth saw blade.  Using the hand plane, I trimmed the pieces hanging over down and flushed them up with the next piece and just moved around the octagon doing this until they all lined up.  I then put a 45 degree chamfer on all exposed corners of the trim using a hand plane and a chisel for the inside corners.  

There was some epoxy work in there before I added the trim, but honestly, that took a little bit of time, but was super easy.  I used a product called Pond Shield that's made for building custom aquariums, so it's food and fish safe and obviously water proof.  There's fiberglass on the inside corners to help reinforce the joints and I ended up putting 4 coats of Pond Shield on.  It's a little bit expensive, but if you want wood that's waterproof, this stuff is really nice and was pretty easy to work with.

So, here's what the font looks like installed and ready to go.