Success!! Finally an end result I'm happy with.
I tried multiple stains, spray finish with color etc. Nothing was working well enough until the simple solution. Water based stain. Works great and allows me to put in the streaking seen on the screen-used.
And for those interested, a rundown of how the ball is created. The first thing I did was create a jig to hold the ball in my laser. Since a laser can't engrave too far on a curved surface before going out of focus and I don't have a rotary attachment (I'm too cheap to spend the $800 for one) I ended up splitting the text into groups of 4 letters. So I would put the ball in the jig, engrave JOHN, then rotate the ball using my indexer, engrave ANDE, rotate again and engrave RTON. Sounds like a pain, but once I got the process down, it takes very little time.
Next was the infill for the lettering. I looked at woodworkers infill and the stuff is like $30 for a kit! My solution - $2 of black sculpey. Just press it into the engraving, bake, sand and presto - cheap black infill. I could probably do hundreds of balls with just one brick of sculpey.
Next was the waterbased stain. Even coat over the whole ball then added the darker streaks with a fine brush. After the stain dryed, i sanded the wood lightly with 2000 grit and then applied a good coat of Krylon triple thick clear glaze. I then wet sand the ball with 2000 again, Triple thick, wet sand, triple thick and DONE!!! So three coats of triple and you get the shine. :thumbsup
I find shiny spheres to be quite mesmerizing.:wacko
And how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Precog ball?
These are all my various engraving/stain/finish tests that I did in the couse of this project.
