Custom Huge Oak Doors: CNC Laser Engraving

CNCROi.com recently completed laser engraving a pair of custom huge oak doors at the shop, each door was about 250 pounds of hardwood and we needed to feed it into our laser due to the size of them.

At 250 pounds, the weight was far in excess of what our laser engraver was designed to hold, so as a result, I had to set up saw horses on both the front of the laser and the back to feed the doors through as production was being performed on these custom huge oak doors.

The advantage of using our laser to do this task over our router was the contrast, if CNCROi.com used our router to perform this task, a secondary process of paint filling and most likely, resin sealing would be required.

By using our laser, it was a one-step process to create the contrast and it actually looks nicer as the grain and other textures of the wood remain intact, they just become charcoal, not just a flat color.

Of course, when it comes to door options, such as dimensional carving and other things of that nature, CNCROi.com can do that as well, here’s a example on MDF at a smaller scale.

As part of the process of processing the custom huge oak doors through the laser, I had to make sure things were level and square each step of the way as the doors were engraved in 4 parts due to their size.

In the above picture, you can see my spacers, just scrap pieces of acrylic, that I used to meticulously make sure that everything was parallel to the laser head as unlike other machines in the shop, if things aren’t parallel to the head, the result would be different, and you’d see a slight gradient left to right as the power would decrease due to the laser going out of focus.

Additionally, for these custom huge oak doors, I had to perform several passes on them with the laser because of the depth required, this is SOLID OAK, and after my job was done, it was going back to the millworking business to be belt sanded and finished, not enough depth mean it might have been sanded off!

Having depth is also important for another reason on these custom huge oak doors, it creates shadows which help accentuate the contrast further on them.

On a far smaller scale, CNCROi.com also engraves cottage signs and house number signs using our CNC laser.

Suffice it to say, this was a crazy amount of work over several days with little sleep as the customer had a very tight deadline to fit the finishing and installation of these custom huge oak doors, it’s honestly all a blur in my mind as there is no way to speed-up the process, it takes the time it does.

Laser engraving is a fun proces, the shop smelled awesome as I was completing this work but it’s still a very slow process over such a large surface area and these are HUGE doors, not what you typically find in a house or even a front door of a house.

When it comes to laser engraving these custom huge oak doors, the design had to be segmented and after several passes, the door was literally fed into the machine for the next segment to be laser engraved, each time the door was moved, all the calibration had to be redone, square, flat, parallel and most importantly, making sure the laser height above the door was the same each time at CNCROi.com.

Although I don’t get to engrave as many maps as I’d like on wood, it does lend itself fantastically to laser engraving.

You’ll notice in the above picture and the larger full-sized door pictures that there are bands of lighter colored wood in the engraving, this is because oak is a natural substance, and as a result, has varying differences in densities, color and texture across each slab that this door was laminated from.

The effects of these laminated wood piece differences are only accentuated by the laser engraving process because smoke and resin settle on the surface, some parts make more smoke than others, but a proper sanding and finishing really does wonders at evening this out a bit more across the custom huge oak doors.

The design was provided by the customer, as well as the custom huge oak doors, and they were beautiful before I did the work at CNCROi.com and even more so after I did the laser work and then even more after the customer did the finishing on them.

You’ll see the shop is still in a bit of a mess during this custom huge oak doors engraving project, the reason for that is that I was still organizing and sorting things after moving in my dual-table Thermwood CNC router, that thing required me to move 3/4 of my shop into a 1/4 space and between jobs, I’ve been slowly putting things back where they belonged.

Pictures laser engrave just as greatly on wood, so you aren’t limited to just maps or lettering when it comes to the process outlined in this blog post.

This massive CNC router has come in very handy, it doubles as my production table for other projects as it’s a 9 000 lbs and can move (a little) manually and best of all, is a 5 x 10 ft dead flat surface at CNCROi.com.

In these pictures, you can really start to appreciate the huge size of these custom huge oak doors, what I ended-up doing, rather than feeding them straight into the machine, was rotating them 180 degrees after the first half of the door was engraved, I’d also move the laser back and forth at CNCROi.com, finding this the best was do to this project efficiently as the doors were floating above the laser bed.

You don’t appreciate the strength of 2x4s until you ned them to hold a lot of weight, just one of these could easily hold 250 pounds, during the rotation process, this happened more than I would have liked but they never cracked from the pressure.

Smaller items can also be carved and laser engraved as you see fit by CNCROi.com.

Tools of the custom huge oak doors engraving trade, a ruler to measure the height of the laser head in all four corners, spacers to lift the doors up and the larger acrylic sheets were to block off the back of the laser so that the fume extraction would suck the air from the front of the laser where the engraving was happening rather than the back where none was being done.

Etching on stainlesss steel can be done with photograph as well as maps, this is especially required if this is to be done for outdoor use where wood just won’t last.

You’ll also notice that the position of the wood had a direct affect on how much smoke was being sucked-up or settled on the wood during the process, the top of the custom huge oak door below was complete, the portion below that wasn’t but you can see there was a lot more engraving on the top portion, this is where sanding will even things out as it removes this layer of smoke that settles back on the surface.

I really enjoyed working on these custom huge oak doors, it was an enormous amount of work, little sleep and a lot of coffee to stay awake but the results were spectacular.

It’s really hard to properly photograph depth of the laser engraving but the goal was roughly 1/8″, this would of course depend on the wood density, more density, less depth, less density, more depth, so I’d measure out the shallowest parts and if there was any doubt, run the engraving over the entire surface again.

If these doors would have been stainless steel, the same image could have been etched onto them, we did a huge stainless steel vault a while back and due to the size and weight, split-up the segments into smaller plaques.

Custom GitHub Arctic Code Vault Fabrication

Here’s a composite of the doors from two different photographs that really don’t do this justice but it shows you just how much evening out happens with the finishing process on these custom huge oak doors.

Of course, I also took a picture with my son Simon after the installation was complete, he didn’t see much of me during the engraving of these custom huge oak doors.

Need to engrave huge doors, wood or metal or even plastic, CNCROi.com can do it for you!