400 Scrap Wood Coasters: Plane, Laser Engrave, Sand, Finish
CNCROi.com slowly builds-up scrap wood that we keep for just this occasion, a customer that wants something unique, rustic and done using a mix of wood species… so we raid our scrap wood pile and transform it into custom scrap wood coasters!
My goal at CNCROi.com is to try to post a blog article and video every two days, it’s a lot of work but we have a huge variety of projects that actually makes it fun but something that’s unique this year is that our Christmas rush hasn’t slowed down a bit, if anything, it’s even accelerated with even bigger projects which is fantastic!
The above is the “after” all the scrap wood coasters were made, a good variety of boards, starting off at various thicknesses, densities and species all came together to produce a little over 400 units and made a huge dent in our scrap wood pile!
For these rough sawed Pine boards, you can see they are almost 2x the thickness of the spec required for this project so there are two ways around that.
The first is planning the board and the other is resawing it using our bandsaw which I absolutely love to use in the shop.
If this was hardwood, then the bandsaw would have gone through this far more efficiently but Pine is just so easy to work with, planning was more efficient to cut the thickness to size.
The results are great, once the right thickness is achieved across all the boards, it’s time to stick them in our Austrian wide-format industrial Trotec laser and engrave followed by cutting them out to spec.
Due to NDA, I can’t show you what we engraved on all these custom scrap wood coasters so I decided to make three additional coasters with the CNCROi.com logo.
When it comes to Pine in this case, the engraving detail can literally be absolutely ANYTHING, here’s a great example of our family cottage engraved onto Pine using laser pyrography.
And the outline can be anything as well… though this is Whitewood, the results from Pine are about the same, the faded edges was due to sand blasting the piece rather than sanding, and yes, wood can be sand blasted!
Your design possibilities are endless with CNCROi.com, there are just to many ways of making amazing work when you have the tools and expertise all in one place with incredible attention to detail.
After these Pine scrap wood coasters are done engraving, it’s time to CNC laser cut them, this makes sure that everything is precise and doesn’t move until production is complete, overkill for a project like this but underkill for some of our more picky military clients.
These are going to the sander so there wasn’t much point in masking them, the sander will make very quick work of the Pine and we have enough depth to not be concerned about accidentally sanding off the logo.
You can see how these scrap wood coasters are looking fantastic, with CNCROi.com, the options are endless, here’s another “version” of a Pine coaster done using a very different approach and equipment.
You can really see the play of shadows in these coasters, they will lose a bit of depth due to the sanding process but you can’t under-emphasize how important it is to have proper lighting when taking production shots, something that I lack in the CNCROi.com shop.
These custom scrap wood coasters are just moments away from being polished from a stone to a diamond, then their true beauty will shine far and wide!!!
For this project, there was A LOT OF SANDING, here’s just one wall of finished sanded scrap wood coasters, the laser does a wonderful job of adding really nice contrasting dark wood on the edges of the Pine, it’s like charcoal but without the mess on your fingers.
After sanding then after clean-up, you can now really see the incredible sharpness and precision our industrial laser did on these Pine coasters, very proud of the end results, and I’m sure our customer will love the coasters we did for them using their logo.
I’d say most of the wood projects we do don’t require or are even finished, just the look of the raw wood and the design engraved and cut into it provides enough WOW.
You really couldn’t have a more different version of wooden key holders if you tried, a natural drawn landscape to a tough military weapon, both out of the same material.
Finishing all the hundreds of coasters was fun, it gives them a wet look, protects the surface and just adds a bit more contrast.
The above custom scrap wood coaster looks great, quite a different look and feel to the acrylic version of our CNCROi.com logo.
Yes, there were HUNDREDS of coasters in this project, I actually started to run out of room to place them all as I’d finish all 400 in one shot so I had to resort to putting them on a piece of paper on the floor to dry.
You can clearly see how each one of these scrap wood coasters is unique, some have knots, others a smooth grain and a whole range of textures, natural wood is really tough to beat for its endless beauty.
Here’s another project we did recently out of Pine to show you how the outline can literally be anything, either all the same or different, it makes no difference for CNCROi.com as we make everything on-demand raw to finished product.
Yet another option, custom coasters out of Corian!
When I say we can make coasters out of just about anything, I mean it, including stainless steel.
Here’s a good product shot of the coasters all finished and ready to be shipped to the customer, packing these was a lot of fun as (not shown) they were put together in packs of four using twine to finish it up.
I can’t think of a better monument to 400 coasters than stacking them all together to display all the hard work that went into making these.
To go from a scrap pile to a finished coaster is quite an achievement, our customer will love these!
Need custom coasters? Corporate, wedding, special events or people, contact CNCROi.com right now!