Engraving Stones: Size, Shape, Density & Aggregates
CNC laser engraving stones produces different results depending on the size, shape, density and the aggregate that makes-up the stone.
The nice thing about engraving stones is that the base material, stones, are found everything and anywhere, so getting few that you like is only a question of time, not money, except when it comes to shipping.
What’s really nice about field stone though is that quite often, there is a hidden layer of live over the surface that’s only visible after its sprayed with water, which produces amazing contrast as the laser vaporizes the life and goes into the engraved stone.
It’s the same thing with sand stone, except in this case, CNCROi.com cleaned it up, so you can only see the maple leaf on it but nowhere near as much contrast as the field stone above that’s CNC laser engraved with the same design.
But close-up with a little water, you can see below that the contrast is greatly improved and that’s generally the secret with CNCROi.com engraving stones, if it’s wet, it looks dramatically better, whether that’s made with water or lacquer or varnish, makes no difference.
As for images and text, your options when it comes to engraving stones is endless, for instance, if you want a face with some quotes on them, we’ve done that, check out the video below.
And yes, that was sealed, hence the far better contrast on that field stone than just about anything else we can do in the shop to create this wet luster effect.
Taking a look at various beach stones, you can see there is a huge variety of possibilities based on size, aggregate composition and colors in just a random assortment picked-up near the waves.
Some engraved stones look dramatically better than others, it really depends on their composition and the size and type of aggregate that’s used.
By far my most favorite is the orange-colored rock, it looks like long ago, this engrave stone was part of a brick and it produced a nice very dark contrasting color compared to the light and colorful surface.
Of course, my CNCROi.com logo watermark is right in front of it, but you’ll see a close-up later in this blog post of that exactly orange stone but take a look at the other engraved stones in the line-up, some appear very nice and others, not so much.
The stone above has a very similar texture to the field stone below, both were engraved using our Austrian wide-format industrial laser but the effect is only different because one is flatter than the other.
By far the worse engraving result was the engraved stone below, if you look at it long enough, you can see the maple leaf engraved in that too but it’s hard to work out because there is no contrast in this stone.
Below is the orange engraved stone, wonderful contrast, beautiful color and by far the best looking one in the bunch.
Of course, beach glass can also be laser engraved, it has a nice polished surface so the results really came out quite beautiful and as it’s semi-transparent, you see the maple leaf regardless of what side you are looking at this beach glass through.
Another engraved stone that produced an interesting result is this reddish guy with other pieces of stone within it, not sure what type of process made this stone but it’s the only one of this type I’ve ever seen thus far on the beach so I’m going to assume it also has man-made origins.
If you have a wedding, a customer that doesn’t pay their bills or need something to hold the door open with custom branding to get a message out there, contact CNCROi.com and we’ll engrave it.
We also keep a small inventory of stones as this happens quite regularly and it’s cheaper to mail a stone out than to wait for one to arrive then mail it out.