This one’s for Arious
3-22-22
One of my best friends lives in Texas and it turns out his partner also had a greyhound, Arious. He had almost the same face as Archie but was otherwise mostly brindle in color. Unfortunately like Archie he also passed away last year, towards the end. My friend reached out, asking if I could make a memorial urn for Arious, similar to Archie’s.
I started with the face since it was the same as Archie’s. Turns out I still had the offcuts of Wenge and they were just the right size to make Arious’s face. A couple of cuts, a little bit of glue, and some strategic blue tape helped easily bring it all together. For the body of the urn I picked out a nice 8/4 bit of Bocote lumber with relatively little sapwood, bug holes, and random cracks. Once I cleaned it up a bit and squared it up I went ahead and re-sawed it in half on my bandsaw, allowing me to get that sweet book-matched grain look. I added some 45º chamfers on the edges of the Bocote then cut down 4 equal length pieces which will become the main body of the urn. With a bit more glue and strategic blue tape I was able to glue up those 4 pieces into a box shape. I once again added some Maple splines to help strengthen up those corners. This time around I made a jig to help me cut those splines. You don’t want to know how janky my setup was when I did the splines in Archie’s urn.
At this point I had a mini panic attack. One of the key things I wanted in both memorials was the ability to have the collar(s) on the memorial itself. In Archie’s memorial I kind of cheated and cut away extra at the corners on the bottom to allow his collars to fit and that was OK since his urn opened on the bottom. Arious’s memorial was going to have to opening be at the top so this trick would not work, and with the current size of Arious’s memorial it did not look like the collars would fit. I went ahead and carefully cut apart the 4 Bocote panels, trimmed down their widths a tiny bit, then went ahead and reglued everything together. I also had to redo the splines, this time a bit thicker since the old ones didn’t all perfectly line up in this second glue-up. Man was I happy I made that spline jig.
Once I was happy that the collars would safely fit around the body of the memorial I went on to create the top and foot for it. Once again I made a similar foot as in Archie’s memorial. I started with an 8/4 piece of Maple, cut the sides so the angles went right up to the Bocote, and made sure there was a little bit that snugly went up into the bottom of the Bocote’s box to give everything a bit more strength. The top lid also has a similar part that snugly fits on the top of the Bocote box, but this one I made by gluing a piece of Walnut to some Wenge. Both the lid and the face are held in place with some strategic magnets.
I wanted to get some decent pictures before I sent it out so I took my folding bench I recently made out into the back yard and set it up in front of my giant bird of paradise trees in the backyard. I also brought out Archie’s memorial for some brother from another mother pictures. I hope they are both enjoying themselves on the other side of the rainbow bridge.
