About four years ago I made a flimsy sign out of plywood and balsa with my name on it for my door. A year or so later a friend gave me a carton of old DIMM memory, and I hot glued it around the border, making a somewhat interesting work of “art” (you can see a picture of it in its former glory here). Since then it hasn’t fared so well; it’s fallen off the door several times, required me to re-glue the RAM sticks, and even then they are always peeling off the wood.
Given the amount of wood lying around, I decided to make myself a new sign, this time using the newly designed logo at the top of this site instead of my name. I used quarter inch thick plywood for everything (except the ram, obviously). I started out printing a template for the letters, and using a band-saw easily cut out the two ‘L’s; the ‘R’ was a little trickier: I ended up using the saw for all straight edges, and also used it to gradually curve the outer part, but the inside posed a challenge. What I ended up doing was using a Dremel and mill bit to poke hols along the edge of the interior circle until I could knock it out, and then filed down the edges to make it look smooth.
The next part was staining the letters. For this I used two coats of cherry to contrast it with the pale back piece, and let it dry overnight.
The last part was attaching the letters and RAM to the back piece, which I did with some hot glue. Unlike the previous sign, I decided not to overlap the RAM, instead I cut the pieces down so that they would all lay flat and have a solid connection to the wood.