Outdoor Historical Plaques: Bone Corian Fabrication
Custom outdoor historical plaques using bone Corian were fabricated at CNCROi.com recently and here’s the process that we used to bring them to life.
CNCROi.com could have made these custom outdoor historical plaques out of anything but by the process of elimination, Corian was the best choice as these were replacing previously made plaques that were starting to show their age and were in need of a refresh.
The contrast is wonderful by the way using the bone Corian we employed with the black paint filling – the font comes out nice and sharp, the images as detailed as possible and it has a nice smooth aesthetic to it compared to the runners-up alternative, fiber etched stainless steel.
Before going through a bunch of custom and very expensive Corian to see how the photos come out on this custom outdoor historical plaques project, I decided to do some testing using just normal acrylic, Corian is compressed acrylic so it isn’t totally the same material properties but close enough to test paint filing and image file optimization before proceeding with the real project.
The results from the initial laser engraving and paint filling were very good for many images after some fixing but I did two more rounds to further optimize and improve the image quality of these photographs, these photos were made many decades ago and as a result, the resolution wasn’t the best, and for laser engraving, you need high contrast imagery for something to look good for paint filling.
Whether you wish to have a very big Corian plaque or many small ones, our production is as flexible as you are, but keep in mind that Corian and other solid surface materials are very heavy so for bigger projects, CNCROi.com generally ships using freight.
At CNCROi.com, I decided to make this custom outdoor historical plaques in multiple passes for the best quality possible on the bone Corian we used for this project, these were all heavily masked so the first pass of laser engraving got through the masking and the harder surface of the Corian with a bit of depth to boot and the second went much deeper, overall, about a little less than 1/8″ deep.
The images were then done in another completely different pass to further optimize the laser engraving for photographs using a different resolution, again, lots of extra work but well worth it to produce the absolute BEST QUALITY custom outdoor historical plaques I could possibly make at CNCROi.com or this customer.
When it comes to Corian, there are uses of this solid surface material beyond just plaques and signs, for instance, it works great for molding cement as the concrete doesn’t stick to it.
Overall, there were 3 different sized plaques to be laser engraved with different information and subsequently paint filled, four of them were an inch thick, and the fifth was your typical half inch thick bone Corian.
Laser engraving this bone Corian is a SLOW process, I could go faster, but then, at least to my eye, the quality degrades exponentially, slow and steady is the only way to give these custom outdoor historical plaques the honor and respect they deserve at CNCROi.com during production.
You can see the resolution I managed to eek out of these grayscale images when I converted them to higher resolution vector photographs, not an easy or fast process alone but these will be outdoors for eons to come, so spending a little time in advance will pay dividends for a long time forward.
The paint filling is done with enamel paint, the nice thing about this process is that if these were ever vandalized or damaged in any way, short of being broken in half, you can just spray them again and sand the surface to bring back the incredible quality of the custom outdoor historical plaques back as CNCROi.com made these extra deep so there is no concern of sanding off the engravings.
Corian can be had in over a hundred color combinations, of course, CNCROi.com can further augment that tremendously with paint filling to suit just about any application.
You can see below what the custom outdoor historical plaques looked like after the bone Corian was laser engraved with the text but not the photographs yet, the color you see there, the darker color, is just the shadow from the engraving, so even, worse comes to worse, the paint filling ever came out, you can still feel and see the engravings CNCROi.com made.
The overall project took well over a week from fabricating and bonding the bone Corian to engraving and paint filling using a mix of CNC routers and lasers with lots of sanding and cleaning-up in between each phase of the process.
My favorite part of this custom outdoor historical plaques project at CNCROi.com was the photographs, unlike the text which is perfect to start, the photos took a lot of work to get just right, the laser makes imperfections pop so trying to keep those aspects of the job to an absolute minimum was very important to me.
Paint filling doesn’t have to all be the same color by the way, we work with what you require.
For this custom outdoor historical plaques project, CNCROi.com had to ship these out in multiple packages as these are not just big and beautiful plaques but HEAVY ones as well, and splitting up shipment as the plaques were done was a live saver for the courier’s back that had to bring these to the customer.
As I had lots of depth on these custom outdoor historical plaques, I could have not masked them at all, just do the paint filling and sand once dry but I decided against this approach primarily because of the photographs, they had some very fine details that I was concerned would be lost, so taking the longer and more tedious process of masking was the best approach overall I believe.
Paint filling isn’t an exact science, this is why, even that process, was done in multiple passes, once the plaques were dry, I’d look over it and give it another spray where the first one missed a little here and there, the have to wait for that to dry and so forth.
Round, square or even odd shapes and sizes, including different thicknesses, are all possible with us, we have the equipment and expertise as you can see from all the reference videos and blog posts on CNCROi.com.
The results of taking my time at CNCROi.com making these custom outdoor historical plaques was well worth it, even I was impressed at how great the photographs came out, the text was always fine, it’s those photos that were the make or break aspect of this project for me.
The goal with paint filling isn’t filling all the engravings to the brim, it’s to get paint all around the engraving depth, meaning, you don’t want it to become a pool of paint but a light spray on the walls of the engraving as well as the base of it, this takes longer but again, my goal is to produce the best custom outdoor historical plaques possible.
The problem with just filling the engravings to the brim with paint is that it removes a very important aspect of the plaque aesthetic, the shadows, even without paint filling, you could easily read the text, the goal of the paint is to enhance the contrast, not muddy it.
There are many applications that Corian or other solid surface materials excel in, and one of those are custom coasters, they are pretty much endless in usage and branding flexibility.
The same goes with the photographs, filling them up, you lose a lot of the resolution I spend so much time trying to bring into being, just paint filling the edges of the engraving gives them the subtlety they deserve, and with the bone Corian, you could swear they were almost grayscale in color variation, though it was all black and white.
Removing the masking, as you saw in the video, was a paint staking process on these custom outdoor historical plaques but I’ve since found a better alternative that would save my fingernails from the paint of being pushed to the limit getting the paint off of them.
I’m very much biased but I just love how great these plaques came out, I wasn’t able to see the finished result myself until the masking was off, after so much laser engraving and paint filling, to finally see the finished results blew me away… I’ve certainly come a very long way at CNCROi.com from the very first time I did this type of work years ago!
It was quite fun to reveal, over and over again, the results of all the hard work involved with turning these custom Corian historical plaques to life after countless hours of getting them primed and ready for the processes that occurred on them.
If solid surface isn’t your desire, CNCROi.com also does a lot of working involving stainless steel.
I look forward to seeing these custom outdoor historical plaques in person when I visit Dallas, Texas one day, I only have fantastic memories of this project and the customer was amazing to deal with as well.
Need custom plaques? Contact CNCROi.com right now!