Real Wood Veneer: Yellow Heart, Alder, Butternut, Mahogany and Red Cedar

Using REAL wood veneer is something CNCROi.com has grown tremendously in capability by using reputable suppliers who offer the customization in raw materials flexibility that our customers deserve.

With over 20 species of wood readily available to use in thicknesses that are paper-thin to raw lumber, your options are infinite from signage to name badges and anything in between. Today, we’ll review five of them, Yellow Heart, Alder, Butternut, Mahogany and Red Cedar.

THESE WERE NOT SANDED ON PURPOSE to show the resin and smoke each produces, it’s a unique feature of each real wood veneer species, this generally sanded upon customer request.

The first real wood veneer we are going to work with is yellow heart. All the wood species laser engraved and cut in this blog post were 1/8th inch thick or 3 mm and were masked, we wanted to show you “some” of the resin and smoke that settles on the surface, not all of it.

Real yellow heart wood is a tropical hardwood that has a very fine to medium, yet even texture to it. The grain pattern is curvy and interlocked and as its name states, yellowish in color.

Like many REAL woods, the dust produced both during laser engraving, cutting and sanding is an irritant so care is taken to make sure to limit exposure. Don’t worry though, we seal this after production and unless you are sanding this yourself, you won’t have any issues.

Our Austrian industrial CNC laser is engraving the same design on each one of these custom produced real wood veneer blanks. For some customers, that’s as far as it goes, wholesale blanks, while for others, we make custom signage, name badges and a host of other products.

Offering a huge variety of species does have its challenges with some customers, it’s like offering them two dozen chocolates and having them decide on only one. Luckily, due to our production methods and suppliers, you aren’t stuck and can pick as many chocolates as you want (minimum volume quantities may apply).

Now you understand why we mask these, you can see the resin deposited on the surface of the tape and below, what it looks like after the protective masking tape is removed.

Generally, we then sand any resin that seeped around the edges so the engraving is solid, the resins and smoke tend to blur things a bit. Next up is real wood veneer of Alder!

We have lots of off-cuts across the species, generally our customers want 1/8th inch or 3 mm, which is why we are making all these real wood veneer tests out of that material.

Like the yellow heart, the alder is engraved and cut with our industrial CNC laser, the only difference is engraving the name of the wood is different on each of them.

This shows the flexibility we offer, for instance, if we were making custom real wood veneer name badges for you, each one can have a different name, design and even shape as each is made on-demand to your specs.

Alder has a light tan or reddish to brown color with a straight and fine uniform grain and texture. Unlike red cedar which you’ll see later in this blog post, it has no real smell to it and is grown in the United States.

After the CNC laser engraving of this real wood alder veneer, it’s cut out from the board from which it came.

You can already see how much darker the color is compared to the yellow heart above, the better the contrast, the better the wood is generally for our production purposes.

As you can see, the darker wood produces far more noticeable resin and smoke surface contamination but don’t worry, that’s very easily removed by light sanding.

Onto one of my favorite woods now, red cedar! It smells great and produces very nice results when laser engraved and cut. The grain and color variance also give it special looks that really stand out as well.

CNCROi.com has access to a tremendous amount of quantity, species, quality and thicknesses to suit just about any application you may have that requires real wood veneer.

You can already see the contrast we achieve with the red cedar, we are generally engraving 2 mm or roughly 1/16th into the these real wood veneers and immediately, you can see far more smoke and resin compared to the earlier alder and especially the yellow heart.

The contrast is helped because of the dark brown and reddish tones in this wood, it just smells great too in the shop when we do production runs of red cedar real wood veneer!

Although the masking absorbed a lot of the resin, there is still some on this wood, it’s just harder to see as the surface for red cedar is far more even and solid than the other real wood veneers. Regardless, it makes for an awesome custom wood business card or name badge.

Now, onto butternut! Each wood species has its + and – when it comes to production, this is why I thought it would be important to focus on each, in packs of five, to help with your decision-making process.

What I enjoy about working at CNCROi.com is the incredible diversity of projects we get to work on and with for our very broad customer base. We help manufacturing businesses with making custom 304 stainless steel machine tags one day, and custom veneer wedding cake toppers the next. Then the next day, production runs for hotels followed by wholesale.

Butternut is a temperate hardwood with a somewhat coarse texture yet a very straight grain. Like all the other real wood veneer species showcased in this blog post, it can be stained, sealed and molded to your needs by CNCROi.com.

The wood doesn’t have as much diversity as the Red Cedar but it provides very good contrast never the less after custom CNC laser engraving.

A great application for butternut real wood veneer includes wall plaques, coasters and signage due to its very consistent surface texture and coloring.

Taking the masking off, you can see that after a little sanding, this will come out fantastic, the straight grain also helps a lot to give it a nice visual feel as well.

The nice feature about CNC laser engraving real wood veneers is that they can be sanded quite easily and the surface doesn’t change, unlike plywood where you can have contrasting layers which doesn’t look all tha

Next up is mahogany, it’s also a very good real wood veneer that we use often here at CNCROi.com. It has a very nice grain and produces fantastic contrast, it also has the name recognition that some of the other woods were use here don’t, especially when it comes to “luxury” materials.

The laser engraving and cutting process between all these real wood veneers is exactly the same by the way, for big production runs, we tweak things a bit for optimal results but for this, trying to keep everything the same to better showcase the differences was higher up on our list of priorities.

You can see the very deep brown color that mahogany produces, it’s one of the darker species we work with that still has a relatively light-colored surface.

After a quick sanding, this again will look fantastic on a boardroom, plaque, name badge or anything else that we use them for our clients.

Say you needed to get some real wood veneer outside of our species selection, that again, is no problem. There are THOUSANDS of wood species out there of which 100 are generally in stock of which maybe 10-15 our customers will ask for. Wood is a wonderful material to use, it’s endlessly flexible, totally recyclable and always in fashion.

Are you looking for something incredible made out of wood? Contact CNCROi.com right now!