Custom Live Edge Ornament: Real Wood Disk Engraving Design
If you aren’t familiar with what live edge ornaments are, well, it means they are produced from wood that still shows the bark (or where the bark use to be), hence the name live edge. CNCROi.com can make custom ornaments out of anything, acrylic through stainless steel, even live edge wood for any occasion or event however personalized or customized as you wish.
In this case, we are launching a new snowflake in our Shapes Library and instead of going with a cut, this time, I decided to engrave it into a piece of rough live edge wood ring. These are as raw as they can be and I took the roughest looking one as a case study on purpose to show you the incredible flexibility and beauty of natural wood. This will be a fantastic looking live edge ornament.
All of these live edge rounds look great, but the one below looked the roughest, these were made quite a while ago and not from our traditional kiln source, these are age dried from decades in storage and were cut with a hand saw. We only have a few of these left (our entire stock is above) so the next round we’d get would be from our kiln sourced mill.
As you can see from the sanding, this round isn’t even flat! That’s why we have an awesome custom-made sanding table and most importantly, lots of sanding tools to turn even the roughest and toughest lumber into something of beauty. This custom live edge ornament will look amazing once we are done with it!
Incredible isn’t it, how something so rough can be transformed using the right tools into something so beautiful! This custom live edge ornament will look even better after we CNC laser engrave into it a snowflake and seal it so that it has a long life after its rough beginnings. Wood is such an underrated material in the best of time, just because it’s everywhere, doesn’t mean it can be used over and over again for other applications.
If you are curious to see how we designed and built our custom downdraft table that got some good use, check out this video. Yes, this table could have been made out of Corian, Stainless Steel or even Live Edge if I had the desire, but in this case, thick MDF was more than fine.
Although it’s extremely sandy and to work with wood in general with all the equipment we have at CNCROi.com, I still mask the surface, it just makes clean-up a bit quicker though with live edges, the mask doesn’t stick perfectly due to the nature of the wood. It doesn’t matter, our sanders quickly pick-up any vapor and soot buildup on the surface anyhow.
Our industrial wide-format laser can easily cut through this piece of live edge ornament but for this demo, we’ll just focus on engraving details into it. Our CO2 laser source has 110 watts and fiber is 30 watts so we can make some pretty neat things into this wood given the application, from stainless steel inlays to melting acrylic stencils into it.
Our Austrian laser is also able to be fed with a database of personalized information, so if we had 10 of these custom live edge ornaments to make but each with a different name, that’s no problem, however quantity you want, we can make it!
What you see being vaporized in these photos are two things, the first is the masking paper and the second about 1/8th inch of this live edge wood, you can see the smoke build-up on the surface of the masking, again, no big deal, just that much less to remove after production. This will provide awesome contrast for our live edge ornament.
The masking has trouble staying on this live edge ornament wood because we have a powerful extraction system all around this live edge disk and compressed air shooting down onto the work at the same time, this causes a whirlwind inside the machine to quickly remove any combustible material ASAP!
After CNC laser engraving the wooden live edge ornament, it’s time to add a bit of darkness to the engraved parts, so an additional pass is taken over each area exposed just to give it that extra dark contrast all around before cutting out the outline of the custom snowflake.
Now you can really see the tack paper starting to raise from the heat, smoke and air, it is doing its job though, making sure only a fraction of the soot settles onto the final custom live edge wood ornament.
As you can see from the masking, it was mostly lifted around the outer edge and not in the center, it does have lots of material on it and where the engraving is the deepest, that’s where you see the most soot on this custom live edge wood ornament.
Once the mask is removed, you can see the spray pattern that’s revealed, although most of the wood was saved from the smoke, like the inside, the outside is a different story. If we wouldn’t use used this mask, the entire surface would be in a layer of soot so even though it got raised, it’s still a relatively easy clean-up than otherwise.
It’s almost like magic, if you look at the original live edge disk in the first photo and compare it to this, you’d swear it was two different piece of wood. This is one reason why I love wood so much, especially live edge and solid, because it’s so easy to work with and looks fantastic no matter what you do with it!
As this is a custom wood live edge ornament, a hole was drilled into the top to hang it, yes, we could have technically CNC laser cut this out but I just wanted a nice clear and laser dark brown hole taking away from the graphic you see of the snowflake.
Take a look at this close-up and you can see how incredible the precision of our Austrian CNC laser is, all the edges are straight 90 degrees down, the surface is very consistent with variation caused by the wood grain density differential. This only adds to the beauty of this custom live edge ornament!
Of course, we also offer custom live edge wood planks too as well as a host of other options, watch this video to see how beautiful and unique our custom laser engraved and sealed wood planks are too!
After sealing the surface, to protect it and make the color variance pop even more, the completed custom live edge wood ornament looks awesome!
After the seal is allowed to be absorbed by the wood, it loses a bit of its orangey color and comes out looks just perfect! I really love how well this custom live edge ornament came out and keep in mind, we can customize it however you like, as an anniversary gift to whatever you wish.
Do you want a live edge plaque, ornament, gift or anything made of any material? Contact CNCROi.com and we’ll make it for you!
