Outdoor Art

[Jim Colombo]

My daughter is planning on making some outdoor wooden Christmas decorations and those that she's seen on the internet use baltic birch. Is there any special reason for using Birch for outdoors or would any other type of plywood be as good.

Thanks,
Jim

[Lee Schierer]

For outdoor projects you want to insure that your plywood is made with water proof glue. Use either exterior grade or marine grade plywood. You also want to seal the wood on all surfaces to keep our water. Baltic birch ply that I have seen is made for interior work.

[Mel Fulks]

Buy some good one side construction plywood and use Titebond 2 or 3 to glue cotton duck on it ,edges too.
Will last for many years. Apply one or two base coats of acrylic paint base coats thinned a little before the arty stuff.
A method that has been used on wood for hundreds of years. Made this suggestion a number of times and not one person has reported back; so I'm slimming down details! Look on you tube.

[Bryan Lisowski]

Mel, what is cotton duck?

[Andrew Hughes]

I was wondering the same thing had to look it up.
Ill let Mel answer.
Thanks Mel

[John TenEyck]

MDO (Medium Density Overlay) would be a good choice, as it is what many outdoors signs are made of. It's exterior plywood with an impregnated paper layer on the surface and paints beautifully. You have to seal the cut edges really well, but that's a requirement on any plywood product. You should be able to buy MDO through any full service lumber yard.

John

[Mel Fulks]

Cotton duck is just a common name for the lightest weight cotton canvas. Any weight canvas will work but the duck works real well and is easy to get at many common fabric sewing stores and the heavier stuff often must be ordered. Duck is often available in bleached and unbleached ,either is fine for my purposes. Theoretically the bleached ,which is white rather than the natural cream color might be weaker. Increasingly even the ladies in the stores don't know what "duck" is, so it might be better to just ask for "canvas".

[Mel Fulks]

MDO is great stuff, but expensive and might be hard to find or only available from suppliers to the trades. The easiest way to glue the canvas onto plywood is glue TWO pieces the same size ,face to face with plastic between them. Thin the glue ,apply to cloth and plywood. Put spring clamps around perimeter and a piece of plastic between the two pieces and a weight (bucket of gravel works) in the middle of surface.

[Jon Endres]

Another vote for MDO. It's used for outdoor signs. As long as the edges are properly sealed, you can get many years out of it. I've left scraps of MDO out in the weather for a few years, unfinished and untreated, and while it shows some signs of deterioration, it's still pretty solid. I used 1/2" MDO for all of my house, shed and garage soffits.

[Tom Ewell]

Mel's process of painting 'duck' is how my in-laws built kayaks.

Wood frames covered with canvas which is then painted with numerous coats. They used oil based stuff but ornaments and maybe even kayaks should be good to go with nice quality acrylic.

BTW those kayaks have been in service for decades

[Mel Fulks]

Tom,thanks! The parliamentarions here don't try anything that doesn't get a second! In olden days they sometimes just used the paint as the glue. But I prefer real glue. On commercial projects I've used MDO, but the old method allows one to try something new and not tie up a lot of space with left over expensive material. And letting a child know that they are working with an enduring material often fosters a little more creativity and artistic temperament. All of my early tests and actual projects have been with exterior acrylic paint and I even had a sample tested by a paint company. But oil paint was indeed used in earlier days.