Happy St. Patricks Day! - Old Style Banner for Flanagan's Irish Pub

Zack Herberholz
by Zack Herberholz
So this has got to be one of my favorite builds to date, an old school Irish pub banner for Flanagan's pub for the 2017 St. Patrick's day block party.

If you have 7:00 to spare I recommend watching the video. There were a lot of techniques and skills that I had no previous experience with (forging scrolls, leaves, and vines), but I'm quite satisfied with the results.




The first step was to hijack an abandoned pallet I found by a dumpster. I've found that a Sawzall is hands down the best way to disassemble these guys.



Since pallet wood is warpy & wobbly, I wanted to clean up and straighten the edges before glue-up.The faces are still cupped, but it doesn't matter as I'm going for an old distressed vibe.
For this I used a couple of hand planes--an aggressively beveled #4 to hog off the nastyness, and a #6 to finish it off



This is my go-to distressing technique, after the paint dries I'll hit everything with a random orbital sander until there is some bare wood exposed.



After wiping the sanded flag down with some Walnut gel stain, and further distressing with an old chain(in the video) this is the finished flag



This was my first time doing scrollwork of this size, the larger the scroll is the trickier it is, I had to tweak this one a few times to get it right. It's strange at how good the human eye is at spotting anomalies in circles, while we are so terrible at drawing/forming them.



Starting the vine-work. All the vines started out as 1/4" steel rod. I've actually found that just by drawing out a taper, a fairly realistic branch/vine texture can be achieved naturally.



Heat, bend, repeat. This part is so much fun!



Next I forged 10 leaves to accentuate the vines, the process is demonstrated in the video if you are curious. This was also the first time I'd ever forged leaves, each one was a little better than the last.



Welding on the leaves, I feel like this step really brought the vines to life.



And now for some clovers and shamrocks. These were cut out from 20 gauge cold rolled sheet steel and textured with a cross peen. I also made a custom anvil hardy to get the crease and bend.



I used both a green and a black solvent dye from Sculpt Nouveau to color the shamrocks and clovers.



Happy St. Patricks Day!


The flag was installed with 8 concrete anchors



Thank you for checking out this Instructable! If you'd like to see more projects from me, make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel ZH Fabrications and check out my website www.zhfabrications.com.


I have a comprehensive list of tools and materials used, along with links to the items in the video description.


Thanks again, and happy St. Patricks day!
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