Custom Dimensional Signage: Raw Plank to Finished product

Custom dimensional signage is something CNCROi.com can and has made a lot of using various processes, today we’ll review yet another way using a few different methods now shown before about how we make it.

I have a pretty healthy pile of scrap since moving our shop, as a result, its time to put some of it to good use for CNCROi.com demos!

We work with a lot of different materials, logos and images so I wanted to do something a little bit different this time around when making a custom dimensional signage demonstration.

I decided to use Chinese characters 麻雀虽小五脏俱全 which roughly translates to mean “Small as it is, the sparrow has all the vital organs.”

It’s like all the demos I’ve done on CNCROi.com, I may make things smaller than they need to be, for speed and it just happens to be what’s left in the scrap bin pile, but it shows you everything you need to know before hiring CNCROi.com that you can have confidence in our company to do the work for you.

There are literally a dozen ways for me to think about making this custom dimensional signage, each process has a plus and negative associated to it and it all depends on the customer’s budget, volume and material selection as to which wins out.

CNCROi.com is a custom fabrication shop, metal, wood, lamacoids, laminates, plastics and the list goes on and each material and design that will be made of that material have a lot of decisions that must be made before any work can begin.

If this process looks familiar, we did essentially the same thing using Corian but in this case, the material was a lot harder than this very soft cedar.

Just like our CNC router can do a sign using any of the thousands of different bits out there to achieve dimensional signage requirements, our CNC laser is just as versatile as it everything else in our shop.

This flexibility is on purpose, as we never know what’s coming through the door regarding our client requirements.

As this piece of scrap cedar is slightly warped and not the best (hence scrap), it’s amazing how we can transform something that people would typically throw away into a very nice custom dimensional signage representation which you are seeing made right in front of you!

Our CNC router does amazing work on aluminium as well as woods of various species including Corian.

It all depends on the speed, bit used and the resolution our CNCROi.com customers require for their receivables.

Just doing this engraving (or in this case V-carving) could have been made almost entirely using our industrial laser or by hand or using our Dremel, it all depends on volume, budget and timeline as to which process wins out.

The nice thing about our CNC router is that it has precise depth feedback, which doesn’t exist with our CNC laser (no laser can control depth precisely).

As a result, if you wanted the letters or characters in this case to be exactly quarter-inch or 6 mm in-depth, CNCROi.com can do that.

If you wanted the characters to be black and the rest the natural wood color, that wouldn’t be a problem for CNCROi.com as we’d essentially do the sign in reverse.

Burning the upper surface with the laser then carving it out using our CNC router, I hope this helps to illustrate the infinite options we can offer your custom project!

The best way to achieve a good engraving using a bit is to use a sharp bit but also to take things slow, optimize your chip load (not too fine, not big chunks) and listen to your machine work, it will tell you everything is going good or wrong rather quickly.

The ShopBot that CNCROi.com has is a wonderful machine, it’s industrial in every way and can handle just about anything thrown at it.

Like our CNC router and other machinery we use here in the shop, if you just listen to it, you can generally know how well things are progressing.

The fine characters in this proverb really put our bit through its paces, what’s amazing is how zero errors there are.

At any time, if something is off by even a fraction of an inch or mm, you’ll see it right away, that’s what quality machinery provides, great results and repeatability you can count on!

CNCROi.com only buys the best!

Now that this dimensional sign is finished the first of many steps along the journey to awesomeness, it’s time to fix some of the burrs and other issues caused by aggressively carving into wood.

We don’t have this issue with Corian by the way as it’s plastic but wood has a lot of issues, from grain to knots that must be addressed.

Luckily, CNCROi.com has a full complement of tools to make even the most challenging job rather easy by comparison.

Our custom drafting table continues to work absolute wonders in the shop among many other tools both custom and stock, that we use on a daily basis at CNCROi.com.

After a quick clean-up, the custom dimensional signage is looking very sharp and nice!

One small issue though, it’s smaller and not proportional to the piece of scrap, no problem, we’ll use our Rikon to fix that issue in a jiffy.

Here’s what the board looks like before, on our bandsaw table, I really love using the bandsaw so making the design so that I needed to use it was the intention to begin with, a great excuse to have even more fun in the CNCROi.com shop!

After a quick cutting, here’s the updated custom dimensional signage, now at the right dimension as envisioned.

I was originally going to step off the bus right after the bandsaw but then I decided this custom dimensional signage needed a little more contrast, so it was off to the laser to burn the wood.

We’ve used this process many times for our customers, it’s better and more durable than paint and doesn’t cover anything up, the natural grain of the wood, in this case cedar, still lives on after the laser burning process.

There we go, totally natural staining of the wood and unlike paint, the “stain” or burning in this case, only happens on the flat surface, hence further enhancing the contrast for this custom dimensional signage.

Here’s what it looks like in the Sun, the lighting in the shop is great but it’s a custom CNC shop, not a production studio, so the lighting isn’t the best for film and photography within CNCROi.com‘s confines.

Here is the custom dimensional sign against the door from our loading dock (yep, we got one).

If you are looking for custom signage, contact CNCROi.com and we can make something awesome for you!