A grave assignment

I am a lifelong friend and associate of Jim Eckford, who, with his wife Carlen, operate the Rancho Burro Donkey Sanctuary in Arroyo Grande, California.

The sanctuary has been in business for over 20 years, and has been home to as many as 16 burros and a couple of mules during that time. The animals come from various places, they are usually in jeopardy or grave danger, and at the sanctuary they are given lifetime homes. They are treated extremely well there.

The Eckfords also provide me with a place to have my wood shop, on the second floor of their barn at Rancho Burro. There I make stuff, fix things, and get into all sorts of trouble. There I have my tools, including the Avid CNC machine that I have written about in these posts over the years. I also have the usual table saws, band saws, sanders, planers, and dust collection systems that make my shop a great place to work.

When the sanctuary needs a cabinet or a sign or a repair, I am often called to provide these things. I do it with a smile, because I have become a part of the sanctuary family. And I have been friends with the donkeys as long as they have been housed there.

And, over the years, some of the donkeys have died, usually as a result of disease or incurable injuries that were incurred before they became members of the Rancho Burro family. Those donkeys have been buried on the property in a small graveyard where they can be remembered by the people who loved and cared for them.

We needed a way to honor them, so I designed a grave marker to identify each of them.

These grave markers had to meet a set of criteria: they have to be weatherproof, sturdy, easy to read, reasonably easy to make, and able to withstand the sun and weather for a long period of time.

Our common friend, Steve Triplett, who is a master luthier and maker of beautiful harps, comes into the story at this point. He owns a saw mill. Steve is a volunteer at the donkey sanctuary, and has provided much love to the donkeys. I turned to him with my list of grave marker criteria, and he told me that he had just what I need: Black Locust lumber.

The lumber in question he milled from a tree that fell near the town of Santa Margarita, about 20 miles from my home. He sliced the log into two-inch boards and “stickered” them in piles behind his shop. There, they have been drying for over a year (lumber dries very slowly outdoors).

He and I took a few of those boards and re-sawed them on his giant band saw into one-inch boards. I took those to my shop where I planed them to a slightly thinner size, and sanded them to smooth finished lumber.

Then I designed the grave markers in Adobe Illustrator, sharing the designs with Jim and Carlen, and getting their approval of the plan.

I ordered some epoxy resin from a company called Total Boat, and ordered a small bottle of black colorant for that epoxy. Then I made a prototype grave marker.

The technique is to make the design in Illustrator, then modify it very slightly so that it will cut correctly on the CNC machine. Mostly this involves correcting the thin parts of letters very slightly to ensure that the 1/16 inch cutter I use to rout the pattern into the wood is cleared.

I use a lovely type font called Arno Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach of Adobe Systems. Even using the bold variation of that font, there are usually some thin lines that are less than 0.0625 inch across. This would cause the CNC software to skip those lines, creating gaps in the lettering. To overcome this problem, I draw a 1/16 inch red circle in Illustrator, and I drag it around the design and put it into the thin parts of the lettering. Where the red dot is larger than the stroke of the letter, I adjust the anchor points of the type as little as possible to get the red dot to clear. That ensures that the lettering will be cut correctly on the grave markers.

I drew a donkey silhouette in Illustrator, working from a photo, and use that to cut the image of the donkey into the grave marker. When the family’s old farm dog died last year I added the outline of a Golden Retriever to my Illustrator library, and this year I added a cat image to make a grave marker for our favorite barn cat, who died of old age.

I put these elements together to make the grave markers, and then I cut the images into the Black Locust lumber. It’s nothing fancy: I rout the images 1/8 inch deep into the wood with a tiny 0.0625 cutter. When finished, I sand the surface, and fill the bas relief with black epoxy.

When the epoxy is hard, I run the board through my drum sander, which removes the epoxy above the top surface, leaving a beautiful, crisp image of the donkey (or dog or cat) and the border in the surface of the wood.

To hold the markers so that they can be put into the ground, I have several inches of the board that goes below the lettering. In that part I cut four holes, and into those holes I insert more Black Locust wood to make cross-braces.

Then I suspend the grave marker with the cross bars in a mold that I built, and I pour 12 pounds of wet cement into the mold, creating a base for the grave marker that will keep it straight and solid when put in the ground. The cement also protects the wood from getting wet and rotting in the ground.

In the end, I apply Watco Danish Oil to the Locust wood, which makes the lettering really stand out against the natural color of the wood. When that oil dries, I apply a coat of Spar Varnish to protect the wood outdoors (I am skeptical about this, but time will tell).

After curing in the mold for two days, I break the grave marker out, and clean the mold to reuse it for the next one.

The grave markers look very nice, and I am confident that they will be lovely when placed in the sanctuary’s graveyard. We plan to place them in the coming weeks (as soon as the rain stops).

With those we can remember our donkey friends and show respect for their time on this earth.