Custom Corian Plaque: Paint Filled

November 14, 2019 Jon Off CNC Laser, CNCROi.com News, Plastic Products,

If you want a custom Corian plaque for indoor or outdoor use, CNCROi.com can make it for you… and there are hundreds of different color combinations to this wonderful material.

For this project, there were a few challenged posed to us, the first was to have a faint background, it might sound easy, just reduce the laser power but it doesn’t work that way, CNC lasers either do something on material or not.

The focus of CNCROi.com is to generally do what needs to be done and figure-out how to accomplish the goals our customers come-up with.

For this custom Corian plaque, we used Cobalt Corian, and it required several passes to accomplish all aspects of this custom job.

Paint filling can be done in a thousand different color combinations, it’s totally up to you as to what’s wanted.

There are quite a few issues that come-up with Corian specifically when it comes to laser engraving, basically, I’m engraving in a solid plastic medium.

A custom Corian plaque is quite fun to make, once the specs are sorted, it’s time to run right into production, CNCROi.com can then paint fill it.

When it comes to producing Corian plaques of any size or shape with any combination of engraving, etching and paint filling, there are a lot of ways to go about making them but a methodical approach is always best.

The bright light you see during the laser engraving custom Corian plaque is the instant vaporizing of the Corian, the results are below.

The problem with the above is that it’s too “bright” and doing a laser engraved overlay will just produce something that’s very hard to read, besides, this plaque needs a faint background like you see in the bottom after extensive spot sanding.

Once the background is made faint, it’s time to laser engrave another pass on this custom Corian plaque, the information that people will read BUT this will not be paint filled, by making the background faint and relying on the laser for the contrast, we have a legible plaque.

It’s great to be able to produce wonderful work at CNCROi.com using Corian, there is an endless variety where this material is the best choice for the given application.

The settings are higher power for this engraving pass, there is a slight difference between the faint background and the foreground that’s now being engraved into this custom Corian plaque but it’s so minor, only a very trained eye would ever notice.

This engraving pass requires no paint fill, the laser does a wonderful job with depth and shadows and scorching to produce just enough contrast required for this CNCROi.com project.

Of course, the engraving process requires a few passes, the first to break the surface, the second to go for depth on this Cobalt Corian.

House number signs are a wonderful use for Corian and CNCROi.com can make them any size or shape just for you!

CNCROi.com has processed lots of Corian for various uses, it has it’s plus and minus characteristics when it comes to end-applications but this is generally a very durable material regardless of the non-corrosive environment it’s put into.

Ah, the smell of Corian at night, the fine powder you see is what’s left over from the laser engraving process on this custom Corian plaque, you can clearly see the background but it’s very faint, the foreground text really stands-out by comparison.

CNCROi.com then cleaned-up the surface and got this custom Corian plaque ready for the next step, the paint filled area.

The nice thing about paint filling Corian is that it adds a tremendous amount of additional color options when it comes to Corian’s already extensive line-up of different color and texture options.

The reason for not doing all these passes at once was because the faintness requires lots of sanding, the second pass is an engraving minus the paint filling and the third is paint filled at a deeper depth with a mask.

The masking saves a lot of prep time, though some spot standing is still required regardless, painting a mask saves a ton of time and CNCROi.com wanted the paint fill in only one area of the Cobalt Corian, not across the whole thing.

The nice thing about laser engraving Corian over routering is that everything is sharp, the inner corners are sharp rather than rounded as they’d be from a router bit.

Regardless of how CNCROi.com cut these custom Corian plaques out, each process has a different result and it depends on the specs involved as to which we use and why.