Walnut Live Edge Branding: Faking Hot Iron Branding

CNCROi.com has done lots of live edge wood, today, we’ll do some Walnut live edge branding using our CNC laser.

There is a lot of work involved with getting a live edge plank, regardless of the species, up to this level of flatness with the bark removed.

We’ll skip all that fun stuff in this blog post and concentrate on the fake iron branding possibilities we offer our customers thanks to our industrial wide-format CNC laser.

Take a look at the edge of this very heavy piece of solid Walnut that weighs around 60 pounds or 30 kilograms.

The edge is cleaned of any bark, it’s an esthetic that you must decide upon ahead of time before the wood is ready for our industrial laser, with bark or without.

For comparison, here’s a piece of Basswood that the customer wanted WITH the bark.

Due to the fact that CNCROi.com makes everything to your spec, you are offered incredible flexibility to match your personal choices and the design you wish to have added to the plank of wood.

We have lots of kiln dried species on hand, from the stuff you find at your local lumber store to more specialty and specializes species to match any taste and budget.

Of course, we’ve made significantly larger and smaller pieces of Walnut specifically at CNCROi.com which required custom engraving and branding.

Keep in mind that the bigger the piece, the higher the costs in both production, finishing much less the wood itself.

Also remember that shipping a huge piece of walnut has logistical challenges as you can’t really cut it in pieces like you would with a 2×4 so knowing ahead of time what your budget is for wood, especially live edge work, is essential.

To achieve the deep charcoal color and the rounded edges that we wanted for this client, CNCROi.com went over this piece of solid walnut for proper live edge branding five times.

This adds significantly to the production cost but the result is spectacular, when it comes to wood, you very much get what you pay for.

Yes, we could have done all of this in one pass but with Walnut being such a hard species, we find it more efficient to just pass over it multiple times, increasingly out of focus (on purpose).

This produces the effect you see, and the best part is thanks to the depth, it can be easily sanded and the live edge branding stays put!

The focus of the first pass is to just break the surface, there is maybe 1 mm of depth achieved, this will increase 3-4x during the entire process but the depth will be in lower returns.

Again, our goal isn’t to go DEEP, our goal is to give it a branded iron look and esthetic, we can go straight through this piece of Walnut if we wanted too.

As the layer of charcoal is built-up and we go deeper and wider (with the beam), fire is produced.

If you don’t see smoke and fire when doing this kind of work, you are certainly doing something wrong. CNCROi.com does smell AWESOME after this type of work as well!

As you progress through these photos, you’ll see the design get darker and darker, that’s our custom CNC laser at work!

It’s a similar effect to what we produced on the custom oak bookmark.

But thanks to the thickness, far darker so there is nothing to come off as there is no paint applied to the material.

Here’s another video showing you how we use our laser to “color” wood, in this case, I believe it was a piece of pine.

There is nothing that matches the targeted burning and engraving that our Austrian CNC laser can achieve.

Match that with our incredible level of experience, top of the line materials and you have an incredible combination ready to make your dreams come true at CNCROi.com!

The wood burning you see here isn’t anything really new, it’s been done for thousands of years, CNCROi.com just brought it into the 21st century with military grade precision and repeatability.

It’s a lot of fun working at CNCROi.com, our customers enjoy the work we do for them, they like the flexibility we offer them and they can count on us to have projects done on time and within budget.

You can now really start to see the darkness coming out of this piece of walnut, it’s 2 inches thick by the way, so we haven’t damaged the strength of this wood what so ever.

The branding with the laser doesn’t really affect the surface due to the way we’ve done it.

Using a hot branding iron produces amazing results on wood, and it’s something that gets cheaper as you have more volume to off-set the initial cost of production.

But when you have a one-off or the size is large, they quickly fall out of favor, and that’s where our industrial Austrian CNC laser really starts to shine.

Compared to a hot branding iron, our laser can produce better depth and clarity and if you wanted each one individualized, there is no better company than CNCROi.com to help you with this.

Think wine barrels, the branding you see here can be done on those just as easily as other pieces of solid hard wood.

With softer wood, like balsa or even basswood, a similar result can be achieved but you don’t get the deep richness that’s possible using a very dense piece of lumber.

Here’s an example of Balsa wood, you can see the results aren’t a dark brown.

The color is more pronounced the denser the wood species.

And due to the low density of the material, doing multiple passes is more difficult as it doesn’t take much to straight through the material, in the case of those boxes.

Live edge branding using our laser can be done onto any surface, and as you saw in the previous videos, it can be a mix of text and images.

The image though needs to be black and white for the best contrast and finishing results.

So the esthetic of the above looks absolutely amazing, the font selection matches the message as does the material.

Just something to keep in mind, but if you wanted something more modern, like a Bible verse onto some Pine, here’s what that would look like.

When deciding on what you want engraved on your piece of wood, make sure you spend a bit of time looking around at the fonts that best suit your message, they make a huge difference.

Back to this piece of live edge walnut, you can see we didn’t cover the entire plank, that’s on purpose!

This isn’t a sign, it’s a serving tray!

Customers will be eating right off of this so we needed some room to the right for the food!

Here’s a great picture showing you the depth achieved on this piece of live edge walnut.

It has a slight beveled look, which is only possible using multiple passes and spending lots of time learning how to optimize our laser to the material at hand.

Do you need something custom-made out of wood? Contact CNCROi.com right now!