My daughter wanted a surf board decoration for her room. The only stipulations were that there had to be butterflies and a beach wave. The board is almost 6ft tall and I decided to use walnut mainly because the board was the right size to cut it all out of one piece. The surf board itself was cut and shaped by hand. I even profiled the back side of the board at the tip and base using a grinder and rasp.
The butterflies are done in epoxy and required multiple layers for all the different colours. I took quite some time as my shop isn’t ideal for curing epoxy and I had to keep moving back and forth to the house. My Shapeoko did quite well keeping zero for the most part. There were a couple times I had to make minor adjustments but that is likely because of how accurate I remounted the board each time.
Anyways, my daughter loves it so I am happy with the finished result! I learned that any little minor imperfection in the wood is really shown when doing a tabletop epoxy coat. I thought it would fill and cover them but really it leaves a void and I needed to clean it up in a few places.
