I’ve been wanting to do this to Keyboard 4 for a while now: A customized logo.

In keeping with the rest of the van’s aesthetic – and my utter lack of refined metalworking skills – it’s going to be extremely rough, ed applied with near-blunt force directly to the metal on the center key. This is an F that lines up with the hood’s centerline and – appropriately modified – should lend a sort of Peterbilt-like elegance to XyloVan’s prow.

I start by doing a plain-stencil nameplate similar to the quarter-panel nameplate that I Dremeled up a few weeks back …

After deciding (rightly, doctor I think) that stencil-font lettering alone would look horribly effing boring, I decide the whole thing will look better polished and give it the once-over with polishing compound …



Then I blow a couple of hours modifying XyloVan’s logo in Photoshop, before printing it out and turn it into a stencil that I apply as the “X” to the top of the F key in question …



How do you sculpt? Cut away everything that doesn’t look like your subject. Here, I’m scarring the metal around the logo and letters with a Dremel …




Lookin’ pretty foxy …