Novelty Pine Poker Chip: Custom Design Engraving Cutting

The goal with these blog posts is to plant some seeds of creativity in our CNCROi.com visitors. Last week, I showed anodized aluminium poker chips being vaporized so this week, I thought it would be fun to make a huge novelty pine poker chip!

For our corporate customers, we make lots of custom wall plaques but it’s fun to show them that there is an incredible amount of flexibility we can offer in design, materials and format.

In this case, it’s a piece of scrap pine that we used to make custom corporate table stands for a huge party one of our customers was having for all their staff.

There was a little corner that was perfect for a custom wooden poker chip, as it was designed in-house, it was made to perfectly fit that area. Scaled to size!

In this case, the design is of a poker chip that’s been modified to integrate a quote going all the way around by Daniel Negreanu, one of the most famous poker players in the world which he states,

The majority of players are looking for reasons to fold. I am looking for reasons to play.

The design has a neat feature in which the words are both engraved and reverse engraved all the way around, to show the incredible precision and resolution we can achieve using our Austrian dual-sourced wide-format industrial CNC laser.

Here’s the video of the anodized aluminium poker chip so you can see how this project was inspired.

Many of our customers send us drawings and imagery to convey what they want their project to look like, this is a great case study.

What’s wonderful about our CNC laser is that this novelty custom poker chip plaque has built-in contrast between the burning and non-burning of the pine.

This means no paint or other additives need to be added to create contrasts in a custom design made out of most woods. The same is true with annealing stainless steel or engraving laminates.

This automatic contrast isn’t just created by the laser engraving process but also engraving of the custom novelty poker chip design. That’s why plaques looks so great out of wood because the edges provide fantastic contrast against the wall backdrop.

The reason I choose Daniel Negreanu is because he’s almost single-handedly responsible for creating poker as it is today. He’s known as THE poker embassador and introduced the game to a whole new generation of players. He brought the game from smokey backrooms into a worldwide phenomenon both online and off.

After the CNC laser engraving of the entire custom poker chip, the next step is CNC laser cutting it out from the scrap pine board. This is an excellent use of material that would otherwise have joined its friends in the fire pit.

The other wonderful feature of pine and most woods, is that it can be sanded. The protective mask helps protect most of the surface from the smoke and vapor that settled on the surface.

The downdraft table I custom designed for sanding is something that continues to pay great dividends in our shop, keeping dust to an absolute minimum and providing a solid surface for a host of finishing applications.

You can see in the picture below where there were some flame flare-outs that singed the edges of both letters and sides.

All that resin and smoke are not only flammable during production but also very sticky on sand paper and on my hands. We get this across a large range of woods, even specialized woods used for skids!

The results require the entire custom poker novelty plaque to be cleaned-up, something we don’t need to contend with if we are making plaques out of say, laminate.

Additionally, the amount of soot varies across a very large range of even on the same board. For instance, a live edge wood plaque produces a lot less in some cases.

While in others, heavy sanding is required, it just shows you the huge variance of results even within the same board and species.

The weight of this custom novelty poker chip though is fantastic, it has a solid feel and presence to it. After a quick clean-up, it will look wonderful!

You can see the before above and after a brief sanding below. You can also see how well the inlaied and outlayed text going all the way around the custom pine poker chip came out.

Let’s take a look at this custom novelty poker chip close-up! That’s when you can more clearly see the magnificence of the precision our Austrian laser can achieve on wood.

You can also see the silhouette around the laser engraved Daniel Negreanu’s name, remember, these are TWO SEPARATE PROCESSES. One is engraving, the other a highly controlled cutting but not all the way through.

Another feature to notice is the engraving and material laser removable process is straight down with a very slight shoulder at the bottom. This is caused by the laser becoming increasingly out of focus as depth is achieved.

The feature I especially like about industrial laser engraving pine is that the wood grain is accentuated. You still see the grain in the natural wood ripple its way through the custom novelty wooden poker chip plaque. You can also see this feature across other wood work we’ve done.

Including other types of wood, wood grain is a great advantage when it comes to laser work.

Do you need a creative company to make something custom for your office, home, institution or manufacturing plant? Contact CNCROi.com right now!