Custom Animal Shapes Painted Plywood
It’s time to launch a bunch more custom animal 2D shapes on CNCROi.com, this time, we’ll make them out of plywood, easily painted, strong and look great painted!
I applied only one layer of spray paint, as you can see from the results, it would need another few sprays to get a more constant and consistent covering of the paint.
The plywood here is a left over from another project I did well over a year ago, this is not the best wood nor is it in the best shape, which makes it ideal. Generally, if you want something to be painted, the best material is MDF, not plywood.
CNCROi.com’s very powerful dual-sourced industrial wide-format Austrian laser can easily cut through this quarter-inch or 6 mm plywood, even with knots and other material defects, it’s still nowhere near a match for our machine.
And yes, there is some serious fire happening under the board, where it’s perfectly safe to happen as our machine is entirely made out of steel. The fire is below the work and not above because we have a jet of highly compressed air shooting down along with the laser beam and a vacuum table sucks it right now along with all other combustible materials and vapors.
Cutting out these various custom plywood animals is very straight forward, simple measurements were done of the scrap plywood and then the animals were sized to fit, so optimal use of material was achieved, turning this waste board into very little waste at the end of the day.
As CNC lasers are affected by material density, there is a lot more smoke and vapor when cutting through a knot than when cutting through open board, that’s just the nature of industrial lasers regardless of how powerful they are.
This is one reason why MDF is better than plywood for painting applications, because the material is incredibly consistent, there are no knots and as a result, when there is paint applied, there is the same rate of drying and “drinking” in the material, which isn’t true with plywood as you’ll see.
As with all our custom 2D shapes (and 3D if you wish), we make them to spec in the material YOU WANT, at the size YOU WANT and in the volume and quantity you desire. Whether you want a hundred cats in the same or different pose or each one given a unique personalized name, we totally do that just for you!
The amount of detail on any of these custom shapes by us or provided by you, is as infinite as your budget, size of the shape and material at hand. For instance, you can add or have a lot more detail that’s noticeable on a larger 2D shape than you can on a smaller one as there is more surface area to show it off.
Also, material selection is important, for instance, you get less resolution on basswood than you do on ironwood, the denser the material, the more details is actually captured and retained by the CNC laser cutter and engraver on the substrate.
As we are going to paint these plywood 2D custom animals anyways, no masking was put over them to prevent smoke and vapor from settling on the surface, which is why they are turning dark in color. Paint covers-up a lot of material deficiencies which is why it’s used for so many applications around the world!
Our industrial Austrian CNC laser is also made to work everyday, day in and out, 24 hour shifts without taking a break. This is important when we have tight deadlines with lots of volumes behind them. That’s why we invested in to the machine we did.
Now that this round of custom 2D animals shapes out of plywood is cut out, we can remove the scrap and leave the good stuff which will then go into our paint booth to be beautified to hide all the material defects in this scrap plywood.
Let’s take one more look at how they came out, the burned edges are from charcoal in the wood which happens during our laser cutting process. Think of it this way, CNCROi.com‘s machine is essentially a fire machine with a high degree of control.
All that soot doesn’t matter, again, as these are to be painted anyways, there is no point in masking them in order to protect the surface. All of these custom plywood animals came out nice and sharp, there was only a fraction of an inch or mm of material vaporized during the cutting process.
And no CNC laser engraving was performed as it would be covered-up by the paint unless it was very deep, again, optimizing processes and material for the application makes thing fast and simple for all involved.
After one coating of paint, you can see how wonderful these shapes came out, they would need a few more layers of paint but I think this does more than enough of a job covering what can be done using an industrial laser and spray paint to produce fantastic final results.
You can buy these custom animal shapes in our shapes library FOUND RIGHT HERE. Alternatively, you can send us your shapes to be custom laser cut to your spec using any material you want. Contact CNCROi.com right now!
