Breaking Ply...Wood that is

Having spend the better part of two years working on thin brick veneers and making a lightweight brick panel I felt that using plywood in my structure was like breaking bad and cheating. However the results of using plywood sped up my construction and strengthened the entire thing to where I can't see building without it. The straight lines and uniform dimensions, not to mention the availability and price. Still there is something about using plywood in my structure that seems like cheating.

The combination of the aluminum and the plywood is what has made the project of building a lightweight curved structure still seem legit. I have been using old aluminum screen printing frames to make the structure and with some wood trim and plywood the two seem to go well together like washers and bolts. I built one curved structure for the back of my F250 truck and surprisingly with two people we were able to lift it off the truck and flip it upside down, which would work great for travel to a location and then assembling the structure on site or to cut down on the wind resistance while driving, which should save on gas.

My other experiments with the plywood dealt with mounting brick panels, painting, applying plaster and printing directly onto the plywood directly. Once I put the structure together with raw plywood I put a coat of paint on the wood to protect it, just a basic coat of latex paint. Next I screwed some panels to the top and although that was the final goal, it didn't look as cool as I had imagined it to look. I was then working on printing some designs and cleaning a screen when I decided to print with some screen printing ink directly on the wood and before you know it I found a screen with a brick pattern and some red ink. The next thing you know I had two panels, that I am going to use as the roof on the truck shanty and they were covered with a roughly printed brick pattern.

The Truck is now a shop

Things have gone pretty well now that I have switched to plywood. Today I drove around with the truck just to check the stability of the shop that now rest on the truck bed. Seems pretty good. My next step is to try and do something to make some money, so I am going to try and get a license and go sit on the side of the road and see if I can sell some t-shirts. The laws are surely not going to favor this sort of activity, but I have to try something. I plan to test it with MarinShirt.com and make t-shirts for Marin County. I already have the designs and just have to update my wardrobe and I could be in action by the weekend. It is sort of like a food truck, but with t-shirts. I was thinking that I could take orders from people on their way to the beach and then they could pick them up on the return. Still that might be too complex.