Technology is truly awesome! We were recently contacted by a retail store that had  their sign damaged beyond repair in a storm. The client had to have the same sign recreated – this was a hand carved Ice cream cone and logo. She decided to ship me the parts to inspect so I could recreate it.

The package arrived and yes it was beyond repair and covered in dirt and… mold.

As I was putting the parts together to get measurements Rad, our Production Manager, walked by and said “Just 3D Scan It”.  I hadn’t thought of it but that sounded like a fun way to reproduce the sign.

So I put together the broken sign on the floor and ran our hand held Cubify Sense 3D scanner over the face of the old sign and it appeared on the screen in 3D model form. Using the clients supplied files I recreated the logo panel in Enroute Pro. I did some touch ups and scaling as well then  programmed the tooling and was cutting within an hour.

We carved the body of the sign from 15lb Precision Board HDU on our MultiCam 3000, – The Ice cream was cut from a 3″ thick block. The cone was cut from a 2″” thick block and the round sign panel was a 1″ thick piece. We then mirrored everything to make it a double sided sign.

Once the body was on its way it was time to produce the logo panels. We made these from 1/2″ Black PVC with 1/2″ White PVC letters and the border is 1/8″ White PVC painted yellow.

We created pockets for the letters for easy registration when we glue them in place.

  We’ve added some magic sculpt for the chocolate chips to give it a little more dimension.  Looks like we’re ready to paint.

Once primed with Coastal FSC-88 Primer we are ready for our color base coats. In this case we are using latex exterior paint. We’ve computer matched the colors from the original sign.

Once the base paint is on we can create the cone texture with two layers of a darker glaze then paint in the chocolate chips. 

And here is the new (old) sign!