My pal John McGeen posted a challenge for February. The challenge was to design a screwdriver. He also said we should “Push the boundaries of what is possible”, and while I’m normally a hammer guy, I figured I’d try a screwdriver.
While John was busy making a real screwdriver I thought about the challenge, and at first I thought about designing a 3D model of a screwdriver, and then I thought about making a nice screwdriver shaped sign using a large piece of wood, and ultimately being overloaded with projects in February I ended up doing something different.
I started this project by thinking about screwdrivers. The first screwdrivers I ever used when I was a kid belonged to my dad. He had nice Craftsman tools. I remember him telling me that Craftsman had a lifetime warranty on their tools, and if you ever broke one, they would replace it. I still have a few Craftsman screwdrivers, but over the years I seem to have collected many other brands. None of them are probably the same quality of the old Craftsman tools, and none of them hold a memory for me like the Craftsman do.
I found a photo of some Craftsman screwdrivers and used them as a basis for tracing the outline I wanted for my silhouette.
Once I had my screwdriver shape drawn out in Inkscape I added the word CRAFT using the typeface Adobe Naskh Medium. I wanted a contrast from the original CRAFTSMAN type which was a simple sans-serif typeface. I also flipped the screwdriver horizontally so the handle was on the left.
Detail of the handle and the CRAFT text. I also colored my illustration green because I planned to use green vinyl, again as a contrast to the red and blue of the original Craftsman screwdrivers.
After the text was added I changed it to outlines and then exported it as a DXF file to load into the Silhouette Studio software to be cut.
In Silhouette Studio I scaled it to an appropriate size for my laptop screen, which ended up being 242mm long (or 9.5″ for you non-Metric folks.)
The vinyl was then cut and weeded. I also cut a small piece of transfer paper to attach to the vinyl to hold the islands from the text in place.
Yes, it’s finally time to replace the Imperator Furiosa skeleton arm. It had a good run of more than six months before the change. (It took a Simple Green scrubbing to get the lid clean before I applied the screwdriver vinyl.)
Here’s the 13″ MacBook Pro with the screwdriver vinyl applied. Overall I’m pleased with how it turned out and it feels good to have some new artwork on the old laptop.
I hope this is enough of a screwdriver for John’s new site GrindstoneMKE. I’m expecting that a bunch of different screwdrivers are going to show up there in the coming days. (I’m not sure if anyone besides me will have a vinyl screwdriver though!)
