Rhino and the CNC Router: Final Assembly
So overall this process was sort of a nightmare. I picked the option that was supposed to be the “easiest” already knowing that I can make anything “easy” and make it the hardest process.
I originally went to Home Depot to get wood but the workers wouldn’t really help me so after some time I left and got the wood from Menards. After dropping the wood off I started by picking up the animals from the locker (not all of them made it). Some of them had to be a bit resized to fix torn bits. They were really rough and clearly were going to take a lot of work. I then started by trying to hand sand but I could tell after the first hour that I needed something to help if I wanted to keep my sanity. So I went to Menards and bought a orbital sander for about $20. Doing the orbital sanding of the sides and front/back took about an hour or two, so not awful.
The next step after this was figuring out how to sand the insides and edges. This took a number of days to do as there was a lot of it and it was very rough. I’d say in total that part took about 7 hours to do, which was a nightmare that my hands, lungs, nose, and apartment are still recovering from.
The next step was putting the polyurethane on them to coat them. The instructions said to sand in-between layers, which as you could imagine, this sent me into deep emotional destress. So I decided maybe I just wouldn’t sand it. This was a mistake I will be correcting before I give them as gifts, but they are pretty nice right now regardless. I put about 3–4 layers of this painted on, which was also time consuming. After the first layer gassed my entire apartment I couldn’t take the fumes anymore and took them home to paint in my mother’s garage. This took a long time to do and is sadly still not 100% where I would like. Since I have to ship them to California I have decided to finish the last layer of sanding and painting out there, just incase something happens to them in transport.
Here are the (sort of) final shots of them.
