Pine Wood Pallet Sign: Custom Design Engraving Cutting
Wood pallets are poorly misunderstood, they are given away by companies far and wide and what most people don’t realize is how GOOD some of this wood actually is for other applications!
In this case, I got a piece of machinery on a pine wood pallet and instead of chucking it out, I made a simple sign and a few other samples for clients – I’m sure they will be blown away at where I got this great looking wood from!
Looking at a pine pallet wood, you can see in its raw form, it doesn’t look like anything useful beyond a fire pit. It’s rough, it’s dirty and cracked.
Wood pallets also have nails and a bunch of defects but if you select the proper area, you’ll be amazed at how well seasoned and high quality this wood really is. It’s quite beautiful and can be used for a huge variety of materials… best of all, it’s mostly free as companies can’t get rid of it fast enough if you visit industrial zones!
The table this is put on is our custom downdraft table which I designed and laser cut using our Austrian CNC laser. It’s a fantastic table, incredibly strong and like the pine wood pallet, people don’t realize how great some cheap materials are for certain applications until you show them what’s possible using it!
You can see that even the area that had nails is actually very good, this can easily be transformed into custom signage (which is what we are doing in this blog post), coasters, key chains, banks and a host of other neat things big and small.
Here’s another piece of skid, you can see, dirty, and junky but a quick sanding using our orbital and ugly quickly becomes beautiful!
Quite a contrast huh? There are lots of different types of pallet wood, some of it is heavy and incredibly beautiful oak, some is softer wood like maple and there is cherry, cedar… the diversity is incredible and the cost is hard to beat.
There are flaws from years of being pushed around on warehouse floors and picked-up by industrial fork lifts and strong men but even deep scratches like you see below can be easily sanded out though I like to keep them as it adds character!
Splits in the pine pallet wood though are generally cut off, there are limits and for this application regarding signage, this split is no good. It’s easily cut using our industrial laser so it’s of no concern.
Because we have a huge Austrian dual-sourced industrial laser, we don’t need to cut the pallet to size to fit within our machine the whole thing fits in there with PLENTY of room to spare.
There is some slight warping but we can account for that in our process, additionally, we have a host of lenses to produce optimal settings across a huge variety of materials and species.
The reason there isn’t any masking applied to this pallet wood is quite simple, we are laser engraving at some depth and as a result, it’s quicker and more fun to just sand the surface after the laser engraving and cutting process is complete.
CNC laser engraving pallet wood is no different than any other types of wood, the advantage of wood of any type though is that it can be easily sanded down for optimal results.
CNC laser engraving wood also allows for nice variances in tolerances, in which the grain allows for slight height variances where it’s denser vs less dense across the pine pallet wood.
One of these boards is going to a customer for a wood sample, hence making two of these across the entire wood pallet. It didn’t need to be cut in half as it fits in our machine as/is.
We can also fit far larger pieces including entire skids if needed, there is an incredible amount of flexibility we can offer you across your pallet wood requirements.
After the laser engraving, the laser was programmed to go back over the outline of the text to increase the contrast so that there is both burned “color” in the bottom of the letters and on the edges with a bit more pronounced darkness along the outline.
After the outline is done by our Austrian CNC laser, it’s time to go to FULL POWER and cut out the outline of our logo on these pine wood pallet boards.
You can see the fire shooting down which is very safe, it’s when it shoots up that there is a problem. We have incredible power available to us, whether this is pine or oak, we can cut right through it!
Depending on the project we have regarding wood, we sometimes mask the surface and sometimes not.
We can always sand the top surface when it comes to wood so it just depends on how much post production we want to do after the engraving and cut.
This does depend though, some designs are more optimal to be sanded while others are optimal to be masked with slight sanding afterwards.
We can of course paint fill this as well if needed, again, we work based on our customer’s requirements and application.
As you can see, the wood grain looks fantastic after being laser engraved, the extra shadow also provides more contrast when put against a wall or on a table for a desk name plaque.
Both signs are identical but the other reason I did two was to show you the nail holes, this is not perfect pine wood pallet, as such, placement of a design is important relative to material defects or issues.
After a quick sanding, you can see how beautiful this design is on junk wood pallet by some people’s opinions.
Looking at the laser engraving a little closer, you can see the variances in pallet wood density, the same results would be evident whether it was cherry or oak.
Need custom, literally anything, contact CNCROi.com right now! This could have been any type of material, laminate through steel, acrylic through veneer.
