How to Clean Wood: CNC Routing Tulip Live Edge Slab
How to clean wood that’s been sitting in a barn for a while? You’ll find out how CNCROi.com does it!
Yep, CNCROi.com uses our amazing ShopBot PRSAlpha CNC Router to clean wood, any species, any size and any type.
For this project, we had a large slab, roughly 10 ft tall and 21 inches wide that had better days but it was time to reveal it’s true inner beauty and that where flattening and by extension, cleaning the wood slab came into play.
There are so many ways to clean wood, the fastest is a planner, which we have and use extensively at CNCROi.com but wasn’t wide enough for this live edge Tulip, the easiest would be to use manual sanders but this chunk of wood was just too big to do in a timely manner as it’s a very hard wood to work with.
CNCROi.com has been experimenting and having fun with live edge of various types since our inception.
By deduction for this specific piece of live edge Tulip, the most obvious choice was to use our CNC router to bring out the natural beauty of the wood grain that layed hidden by a layer of darkened mold and Sun bleaching.
Just look at how much of a huge difference the before and after was on this piece of live edge tulip, having clean wood for additional processes is very important for CNCROi.com especially when it comes to laser engraving the finished piece.
Big slabs, small slabs, thick slabs, thin slabs, regardless of what you need done, there is that perfect chunk of wood waiting for you at CNCROi.com.
I’ve seriously lost track of how many slabs CNCROi.com has cleaned-up and flattened since we got our amazing full sheet CNC router but it really never gets old, each piece of wood has its own unique story told both at the surface level and under and I get the honor of exposing that to our customers far and wide.
Most of the slabs we work with when it come to clean wood is actually already well sanded, it just isn’t flat enough for the customer’s intended application or for our CNC laser engraving for things like custom cottage signs or increasingly, custom furniture which I’ll outline in future blog posts and videos.
Have some questions about live edge leveling, this should answer some of them.
The transformation of this live edge tulip though has really been at one of the top regarding transformations, it really went from something people really would probably chop-up for firewood into something absolutely stunning.
Having a nice clean wood surface that’s flat is something that is really hard to over emphasize, it’s just so wonderful to be able to make interlocking joints that WORK, tables that are level and legs that are dead easy to measure flat with the floor.
As for how much material is removed, it’s generally between a half-inch to an inch for most projects, but we have had some seriously warped stock that needed far more.
Want a huge house number sign? CNCROi.com makes those too… this was among our biggest at the time using live edge Cherry.
The CNC router does a relatively quick job of making dirty wood clean, I don’t bother removing any dust, dirt or grime, our surfacing bit will remove that while making the live edge flat and parallel.
You can see how the clean wood is starting to show-up in the top left of the image below, it’s quite a contrast in this case but sometimes it’s hardy noticeable and in those cases I have to mark the surface with a pencil.
You have to remember that clean wood is a byproduct, a nice one at that, of the live edge flattening process that CNCROi.com had done a lot of in the past.
Family wood signs are also a wonderful use of live edge, start with clean wood, end-up with a beautiful wooden sign that will last generations.
There is dust and chips produced during the clean wood process but they are sucked-up by our dust collector, otherwise, CNCROi.com would be easy to find under a pyramid of saw dust on some days.
Unlike other live edge flattening processes, using our CNC router flattens the entire board, not just where it’s being worked on, such as with a wood planner.
Custom live edge shooter trays also make for fantastic gifts for people looking to enjoy live in style.
The dots you see surrounded by clean wood in the image below aren’t indentations, they are actually knots naturally found in the Tulip wood.
I decided to do this live edge Tulip in two passes because I wanted to see how doing things a different way than we normally employ to clean wood and flatten it goes, if you want to learn how to do something better, you have to try new things and augment it continuously.
You can really see some bowing in the wood grain in the photo, when a live edge board is clean and flat, this is gone, everything is totally parallel.
I’d say the vast majority of CNCROi.com‘s live edge jobs are for custom cottage and house signs, they are unique and will last a lifetime if well taken care of.
The contours and grain patterns of live edge board are unique, no two planks are the same and that’s what makes this type of work so enjoyable, there is always something new and interesting to see.
Of course, clean wood using a CNC router does have it’s limitations, I could keep on going deeper and deeper into this live edge Tulip but I decided to stop once I had a good side and a pretty decent back one, the dimples of mildew are easily taken care of using traditional sanding, the major hard stuff has been removed at CNCROi.com for the customer.
Wow, just look at the amazing grain pattern in this live edge Tulip, this is really a clean wood, so few flaws and perfect for laser engraving for a host of applications!
Want some clean wood? Contact CNCROi.com right now.