I made Dad a new sign for his garage this summer and decided that he needed one more for his birthday.
Dad has a 1954 Allis Chalmers WD 45 tractor. It came with the house and he has done a lot of work on it to keep it running faithfully for the last 32 years. It gets a lot of use in the winter because that’s how he keeps our 1/4 mile driveway plowed in the winter. Elijah LOVES that tractor and named it Otis after one of the book series that he likes.
I found a good picture online of that same tractor and spent a bunch of time drawing it. There are some tools in Inkscape that help to trace the lines of the image based on color and edge detection, but it still results in a lot of manual work to clean it up and reshape the mistakes. Once I had the image file, it was just a matter of cutting it/engraving it out on the laser cutter.
I tried to make a totally different design than the first sign. This one is pretty simple looking but I think it came out nice. Now that I have the vector file of this drawing saved on my computer, I might revisit this one again in the future. I’m thinking about making something for Elijah’s room so that he and Papa can have similar signs hanging up.
Love this sign! And just for the record, this 1954 tractor has been under our care for 32 years. Lots of memories associated with this machine, which include my Dad, my family and now my grandson, not to mention school hayrides & many projects.
Oops. Math is hard. I’ll correct the post.