We’re convinced a previous guest of ours – a friend who stays with us regularly – wandered off with our spare key last time he stayed over. He says he doesn’t have it. We reckon he just hasn’t bothered checking properly! Still, we may be wrong, and it may turn up here at some point.
Anyway, I got some new keys cut today, for our AirB&B guests. I decided I wanted to make them less easy to lose, and that key-fobs might be the way. None of the ones at the key-cutting shop were suitable/nice enough. So I resolved to make some wooden ones.
They’ll be big ‘n’ chunky, in a nice dark hardwood I wish I knew the name of, and I’ll be putting the AirB&B logo on them. To that end I printed logos, and glued them to the wood.
As many have observed before me, the current AirB&B logo resembles female genitalia more than the various concepts it supposedly embodies. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind breaking my usual embargo on ‘brand’ labels?
Some time later… Hmmm, well, as can be seen below, that didn’t work! The one on the left I carved using some mini-chisels I bought via Amazon, for model making. They cut through styrene fine. But they wandered all over the place in this hard wood.
I painted in the carved area, and then sanded back. The idea is sound, but it just didn’t work here. The grain of the wood has all these fissures, so even if I had carved the logo superbly, the paint would have bled into the fissures, and never looked as crisp and neat as I wanted.
For the one on the right, I traced a dotted line through the centre of the line described by the logo, in the manner of a renaissance painter transferring their design from paper to a painting surface, with pin-pricks. I then carved as light and accurate a line as I could, following the pricks (sounds a bit rude!).
I wish I’d photographed that stage, as it actually looked pretty good. I then tried to manually move the wood underneath a dill bit, in the drill-press, to ‘draw’ a bevelled channel in the groove I’d carved out. Once again, however, wobble and wandering ruined the design.
So I’ve opted instead to just stick a large plain wooden doodad in the key ring, and keep it ultra-simple. Disappointing. Especially given how much time I wasted on trying to make it work.
* College, Cambridge, the ‘Gate of Honour’. My dad had a pot labelled Caius, in which he kept old, random, spare keys…