Custom Welcome Board: Black Walnut
Custom welcome board can be made by CNCROi.com with any design you can imagine, using any wood species that’s available and at any size or thickness you desire.
In this case, CNCROi.com made a custom welcome board using black walnut roughly 4ft high by a food wide depending on where the measurement was taken.
What is a custom welcome board? It’s something people put at the front of their house to welcome visitors, they are quite popular and I think it’s a neat way to put a friendly impression on people coming to your home.
After the design was made for the customer, it was time to power-up our CNC laser and begin engraving the board, you will notice that we used the laser for the whole job, it was just easier than booting-up and warming-up the router to do the WELCOME part of the sign using the laser in this instance, although production time is dramatically slower using the laser over the router.
A common question I get is do you leave the bark on the edges or not when it comes to live edge work, well, it’s going to fall off anyways overtime no matter what you do so I generally prefer to remove it in the shop then seal the entire job rather than trying to seal bark that will slowly fall off, especially if it’s exposed to the elements such as this custom welcome board will be.
Woodworking is a lot of fun, each material, like machine, has their own esthetic and cost benefit analysis when it comes to custom production.
CNCROi.com does a lot of custom woodworking, we have two routers, a laser and endless power and hand tools to make just about anything using wood, from tables to small signs.
For this custom welcome board, the customer decided on each and every element, from the font used on the sign to what graphics were to be used and wording, that’s the advantage of custom, you get what you want how you want it!
As for the depth on this custom welcome board achieved using the laser, it was just shy of a quarter inch deep, why so deep? Because the customer will be doing a resin fill on all the elements on this Black Walnut live edge board.
Signage can be made in so many ways at our shop.
Of course, the CNCROi.com shop smells wonderful when ever we do this type of work, nothing beats the smell of burned wood to freshen-up the shop between jobs that we do that don’t smell anywhere as good as this does.
For this job, CNCROi.com did two passes, one to break the surface and get a little depth and the second to get a lot more depth, we find that it produces a better finish and results over trying to overpower this in one pass.
CNCROi.com‘s laser can open-up in the front and the back, but for this job, it was easier to just flip the board around and do the other parts upside down after some fancy mathematics were involved – the machine works just as well in any orientation but if this board was just slightly bigger, I would have just fed it through the machine front through back.
That’s the advantage of CNC equipment, it’s fine doing any type of work you give to it, even when you tell it to do things wrong, it does it anyways… which is why care must always be taken with these behemoths of industry.
Of course, if you wanted something a bit stronger and durable than wood, CNCROi.com can also make custom welcome signs using metal!
You’ll notice that no masking was done on this custom welcome board neither, that’s because the customer will sand the entire live edge board flush after the resin fill dries, so making a smoky mess doesn’t matter at all in this case.
Laser engraving is a fun process, if I already has the router warmed-up from another job or anything more than one of these boards to be made, I’d do the whole WELCOME using the router, that’s the advantage of CNCROi.com we can mix and match machines for optimal production.
Each machine has their cost benefit analysis when it comes to fabrication, it’s deciding what works best where that involves a little critical thinking, again, this was a one-off board so going through the hold-down and warming-up of the router just wasn’t justified for this specific project to produce the same result.
Laser engraving isn’t better or worse than CNC carving, it’s just different, and it all depends on the design spec as to what is done how and when.
The advantage of the laser engraving is higher resolution, but the WELCOME is so big, it makes no difference, but the laser produces far nicer smells than the laser when it comes to carving into wood even with far slower production times in this case.
Laser engraving the Black Walnut basically instantly vaporizes the wood in place, producing smoke and that is what settles a bit around the letters, it’s easily sanded off as there isn’t any depth to the smoke.
Laser engraving is very precise, but it’s the same precision as the router, I can go over the exact same area multiple times without any variation, unless the board moves, things will be dead-on always.
Now that this custom welcome board is coming to an end, you can start to appreciate the size and esthetics CNCROi.com can add to any home when it comes to custom woodworking.
Just to show you the process of CNC carving in contrast to the laser, here’s that set-up.
This sign honestly looks great just as it is, would look just as good resin filled (to add color) or even if it was sanded to only showcase the laser engraving darkness… you really can’t lose no matter how you finish a board like this.
This is a sizeable piece of Black Walnut and it looks great just the way it is, it’s as unique as a fingerprint and just as aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
Here’s a close-up of the engraving from the laser, as you can see, the smoke is just on the very top surface and the contrast is permanent, what you see here isn’t ink or dyes but charcoal.
Need a custom welcome board? Contact CNCROi.com right now!