Thread: Weather station

Back in 1917, the river gauge on the Lachlan River @ Cowra was moved to the main road bridge. Before the new bridge was built in 1986, a colleague salvaged an original cedar gauge board. He'd kept it until now, and asked me to make something from it.
Considering it had been in and out of the water every day for nearly 70 years, had been shot at, hit by logs and debris and lain in a workshop for years, where it had mineral oil spilled on it, it wasn't in bad condition.
The first step was to clean it as much as possible. First, I scrubbed it with hot water containing detergent to remove surface dirt and grease. Then I scrubbed it several times with white spirits, making sure that it was soaked. After the last scrub, I packed it in Kitty Litter (Fullers earth) and wrapped it in plastic for a couple of days, after which it was left to air dry.
The design process was difficult. He'd given me free reign, and in view of our work a weather station seemed appropriate, but I didn't want to mount instruments in the board. I also wanted to let the board show as much of its history as possible, and I wanted something that connected it to the river.
I settled on mounting it on an Australian white beech base, with its surface carved to represent the flow of water. I dressed and sanded the base & gave it a coat of white shellac before drawing the pattern and carving it.
This is my first attempt at carving, and I found the timber easy to carve with my cheap carving set.
Once it was carved and the mortice cut for the board to sit in, the surface didn't show the strong visual contrast that I wanted, so I decided to stain it using U-beaut water based dyes - again, something I'd never done before. I put a coat of wax on the top surface that I didn't want stained, mixed up a brew that looked the right colour and carefully brushed on the dye.
Disaster! When it dried, the brow that I had brushed on was hot pink! OK, what does the Polisher's Handbook and the info leaflet say about this? Do a test piece! In hindsight, that seemed a good idea. I added what seemed like a gallon of green-black and diluted it, and did a test piece. When I put it on, it looked a kind of murky green, but eventually it dried to a quite nice brown, so I went with it. After it was completely dry I gave it a very light sand, then a coat of shellac followed by another light sand. This laid the foundation for four coats of wipe-on poly and a coat of wax.
The next question was what to do with the gauge board. Short of completely removing all the character of the board, it was never going to take a nice smooth finish. In the end, I gave it a couple of good coats of shellac to toughen the surface, which had the effect of also livening up the previously grey surface. The final part of the finish was to give it several coats of wax to bring up a slight sheen.
The cedar board that the instruments are mounted on was dressed, sanded and finished with wipe-on poly. The dowels that support the instrument board were turned from silver ash, with markings to represent the rods that are used to support a current meter. The final assembly was glued using tinted epoxy.
After it was completed, I discovered a copper medallion produced by the department we'd worked for, with its logo, the ibis. This was inlayed on the front of the base (not shown).
In a couple of weeks I'll have the pleasure of delivering it to him - I hope he is as happy as I am with the result.