My mom made a sign in the shape of an apple for the apple farm in Eureka, CA when she was younger. It was a piece of board cut and painted like an apple, about a foot wide, and my grandpa hung it near the entrance to his farm when he had apples for sale. It lasted several decades but was stolen a few years ago. I resolved to replace it with another, better sign. I wanted a large three-dimensional sign shaped like an apple. I figured it wouldn't be too hard to create, but I had no experience in doing so. Having talked to my cousin Mike about it, he seemed convinced that it might be worth a shot, so we went to the hardware store. We bought some stiff wire, some flexible wire, some quarter-inch square wire mesh, and some Fix-All. Mike left it to me thereafter. I bent the wire into loops that looked like an apple cross-section; these formed a frame of longitudinal supports. Next, some latitudinal circles were formed, and the intersections of the wires were secured using a thinner, more flexible wire. The intermediate result was a rough skeleton about 27" in diameter. This phase went fairly fast; the next steps, however, have taken a long time.
I knew that water could collect in the top of the apple and potentially damage it, so I decided to have a stainless steel funnel and hose provide drainage. The funnel is mounted inside the apple under the stem.
There were open panels of about 6"x6", so I used the wire mesh like a fabric, cutting and sewing about 24 "orange peel" sections together using tin-snips and thin flexible wire. It looked reasonably nice, though there were vertical ridges that followed the wires of longitude becase the sections of mesh curved only one way — vertically.
I needed to make it smooth horizontally too. So I bought a gallon of exterior yellow wood glue and tore up strips of paper. The glue I dilluted with water and applied the strips as a sort of paper mache (but not chewed up). This tedious phase smoothed out the ridges somewhat, but completely. I tried adding more and more layers of paper, which looked like it was working while wet, but not so when dried. Having dried, the paper shrank to approximate original shape, thus failing to fully elliminate the bumps.
The latest smoothing technique I tried is to use DAP vinyl spackling compound. (I couldn't find the Fix-All that we initially bought.) I've spent over a hundred hours on this damn thing. I think this vinyl spackle will work, but the apple is growing heavy.
I have some photos of the current state of the Great Apple, showing the paper mache and the spackling as of now.
Posted by seander at May 7, 2004 02:57 AM