Pine Round Wall Plaques
Making custom pine round wall plaques is a relatively straight forward process for CNCROi.com as we’ve done this before using a variety of different materials from woods to plastics and even metals.
As mentioned in the video, we can literally make this out of any material within any design parameters, but for this specific project, round 9″ diameter laminated Pine was perfect to fit within the budget and space constraints that this project was put within.
The typical plaque CNCROi.com fabricates in the shop, regardless of the material or seize, involve a logo with some text but in this case, it’s a full logo frontage.
The thickness of the custom pine round wall plaques is three-quarter inch, which is well within the parameters of our laser to easily cut through.
As the name indicates, laminated Pine is made-up of pieces of Pine that are glued together at the mill and made into solid sheets, the advantage of this over live edge is that extremely wide Pine trees are very hard to come by and thus prohibitively expensive while you can get similar widths using the lamination process at a fraction of the price.
As with most woodworking projects at CNCROi.com that involve laser engraving, I perform the entire process in two to four passes rather than one super powerful one pass.
This is in contrast to metal where we want to pass over the surface just once or twice (spec depending).
When it comes to these custom pine round wall plaques, the goal of the first pass is to break the surface, as these have been compressed and hardened during production at the mill.
The second pass and those thereafter are focused on darkening the logo on the custom pine round wall plaques to increase the contrast to the “white’ish” color of the Pine.
Laser engraving is performed before laser cutting because CNCROi.com wants to keep the board that these custom pine round wall plaques are coming from as whole for as long as possible for accuracy and precision sake.
Of course, CNCROi.com also has CNC routers and as such, we could have cut these rounds out and then moved them onto the laser or even done the entire job on the router but the laser provides free contrast during the production process itself, so it’s better suited to this specific application.
To give you an idea, we can also engrave photographs onto wood with incredible aesthetics, so you aren’t trapped to just solid logos.
The bright light you see in these photos is the instant vaporization of Pine when the laser hits the surface of the Pine, the more the power, the more the depth and by extension, contrast produced.
Regardless of the platform CNCROi.com employs to make custom plaques (in this case), each machine has it’s own envelope of use and having a variety allows us to pick the best machine to suit the job.
While producing charcoal with the laser on the surface of the custom pine round wall plaques, there were some flame shootouts like the picture below, the reason for this a lot less vaporization is happening and a lot more intense heat generating a fire.
Of course, the fire is safe in the machine at this scale and frequency because we have a powerful air compressor shooting air down on the work which puts it out almost instantly and extraction system that sucks combustive smoke out as it’s produced so there is no chance of it building-up to unsafe levels.
The deeper we go and the harder the wood, the higher the possibility of fire being produced and with most hardwoods, the contrast of the charcoal is also much higher than softwoods like Pine.
Unlike traditional wall plaques, these custom pine round wall plaques have some depth and texture to them, you can feel the surface, feel the grain and it’s completely different than something that’s just sublimated onto an aluminum plate (how most of these are made in corporate offices around the world).
The nice thing about charcoal being produced over inks for contrast is permanency, this will stay on there as long as the Pine is there, it will not fade, crack or peel over time.
After the laser engraving process, it’s time to cut out these custom pine round wall plaques from the laminated sheet, one machine to do everything saves a lot of time (and customer money) but in very large production runs, it would be more efficient to router out the circles and then laser engrave using the laser.
If you are looking for matching awards to go with plaques or a mix and match, CNCROi.com can of course make those for you as well.
Looking at the custom pine round wall plaques right out of the machine, you see smoke on the surface of the Pine that isn’t engraved.
These smoke stains on the surface are easily removed using a sander, no masking was applied as this design didn’t lend itself to it.
You can now gain appreciate on just how beautiful these custom pine round wall plaques look once they are cleaned-up with the sander.
But before shipping these plaques from CNCROi.com to the customer, we need to seal the surface of these in our paint booth.
What the sealing does is protect the entire custom pine round wall plaques from the ravages of humidity changes in the environment these will find themselves in… it also adds to the beauty of the wood because it greatly increases the contrast of the charcoal to the non-engraved areas.
Need custom wall plaques? Contact CNCROi.com right now!