The Flat-Stick - Painting, and introducing the "Bigly" 400x300 stick

Bamboo plywood has many redeeming qualities; It's cheap, strong, looks good, and cuts really well. But it's literally impossible to sand, so painting it can be tricky.

If you just blow a bit of paint over the untouched wood you get quite visible grain. This can be used to good effect, and in flat black it tends to look like burnt wood. It helps that the pieces are all cut with respect to the visible grain, with the top panels having vertical grain and the side pieces horizontal.

Alternatively, if you leave the protective paper on and paint over that, you can hide the grain completely, and end up with a lightly speckled satin finish. To get a full gloss finish, the easiest way by far is to just clad the raw wood with acrylic. It comes in a vast range of colours and styles, and i'll touch on that subject soon.

The paint effects available in a range of colours, Satin vs grain. I actually like the silver more here than i ever have on other projects.

So here's the "Bigly", the larger A3-sized version of the case, with a couple of light coats of satin black. It looks like the bottom of a fire pit, i love it!

And with the case assembled. I like to leave the other surfaces clear, it creates a nice two-tone effect, and the black paint with black frames helps to "disappear" the border between metal and wood.

The fully constructed case. The inset walls combine with the dark aesthetic to create an architectural "floating" look. It's my favourite look for the stick, industrial but light, like a timber-clad monolith.

And a size comparison of the two sticks. The Bigly has twice the footprint of the smaller stick (name pending), but the same thickness. Both offer a comfortable amount of room to rest your wrists, but the bigger stick can accommodate the widest of laps. It's superbly stable.