CNC Laser Engraving a Wooden Cottage on Wood

Using a CNC laser to engrave a wooden cottage on wood is one of the many things we can do here at CNCROi.com. Before we go down the road of how this came into being, let’s take a look at the original version I made of this same cottage a few months back.

This looks great – pictures really don’t really do this justice – but it gives you an idea of what can be done with our Industrial wide format CNC laser. The issue I didn’t like about the photograph is that when I took it, the Sun was on the wrong side, giving it a dark look. I went back to the cottage about a week ago and took an updated photo with the knowledge I gained from all this neat CNC laser stuff I’ve been doing for almost a year here in Canada (longer elsewhere).

First step is putting some masking on the wooden board, this is important as lots of soot is released during the engraving process and a pain to remove, this makes it easier though it’s a pain to take off all the small little flakes left after the engraving is done.

The board is a bit bigger than I need for this project so I’ll cut it after the fact so I have a nice edge. Laser engraving this time around was done with twice the power of the previous cottage on wood, reason being, I wanted a deeper etching though this dramatically increased the engraving time.

You can already see the difference in contrast, this wood is the same type, actually from the same sheet, as the original cottage by the way. The difference is the light was on the face of the cottage rather than the side.

This looks a lot rougher than it really is, what you are seeing is a lot of stick soot settling on the masking paper, which is better than having it on the wood! It almost looks embossed doesn’t it? That’s because there is a greater concentration of soot on the edges than the middle of the “island” of masking, it’s a visual mirage. The edges are SHARP!

Now that the process is done, you can see this visual effect more closely, I could technically fake this effect by engraving this wood as if it was a stamp with a shoulder but that tends to soften things up. Not what I want for this project.

Now that the masking is done and some additional cleanup is done, you can see how great this looks, there are still a few areas that need a bit more refining but this is far better, in my opinion, than the first one I made.

Cutting the scrap off the board and voila, the CNC laser engraved wooden cottage on wood is done! This would look great just as-is hung on a wall or with a coat of varnish or epoxy. In my case, I’m leaving it as-is.

With the light straight on, cottage looks great with a lot more contrast and a less washed-out look that is achieved by going deeper into the wood. Watch the video!

What makes CNCROi.com unique is that not only can we do thousands of these, with each being identical (except for wood variances) but we can do this across a variety of materials from stone to steel! I’ll be sourcing some “exotic” materials in the near future to demonstrate just how far we can take these capabilities… there is very little we can’t do and if you think this is cool, wait till you see what we have in store!

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304 Stainless Steel fiber laser annealed.