Throwback Blog: Laser-Engraving Faux Wood into Precision Board HDU

This blog on creating a faux wood look with HDU using a laser system originally ran on 5/20/19.

A customer contacted us wondering if they could create a faux wood pattern on Precision Board HDU using their laser system.  They did not own a CNC and were trying to get a competitive advantage with what they had in house for equipment.  We reached out to our friends at Trotec Laser and asked them to have a go at creating a woodgrain look on Precision Board HDU using a laser…and the results are amazing!  Check out the photos and videos below and read more about how they did it.

faux wood

The first step that needed to be tackled was finding woodgrain patterns to program the software with.  Cameron Youngblood, Senior Marketing Specialist with Trotec Laser, searched online to find a collection of woodgrain patterns.

“Finding a high quality image is key to achieving an ideal and realistic end result. We found a few different free images that didn’t require a lot of editing or manipulation in our graphics software,” she says. “There are a couple of different approaches you can take to alter the image into a laser-ready graphic, and some of these approaches are dependent on the image itself. For example, finding an image that has multiple shades of blacks and grays may engrave better as a grayscale image.”

Cameron says more laser engraving power will be applied with the black areas and the power will decrease as you get into the various shades of gray- any white areas on the graphic will not be engraved. The more laser power is applied, the deeper the engraving area will be.

She cautions that it might take the user a little time to test out the settings, but as long as you can get a good image, it’s definitely possible to program your laser system to engrave a faux wood pattern into Precision Board HDU.

“Since the images we tested were black and white, we opted to use the color mapping option in our JobControl® laser software,” Youngblood said. “Color mapping allows you to assign different actions to each area of your graphic, as well as indicate the order in which each action should take place. In this instance, we used a total of three colors: one color for the deepest engraving, another color for the lighter engraving, and the third color for completely cutting through the material. This allowed us to achieve our preferred contrast between the two different engraving depths.”

Trotec Laser used their Speedy 400 120W CO2 laser on samples of PBLT-15 Precision Board HDU to get a faux wood look.

Here’s the settings info:

  • Engraving (first color) = 90{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} power, 60{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} speed, 1000 PPI
  • Engraving (second color) = 30{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} power, 100{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} speed, 500 PPI
  • Cutting (third color) = 100{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} power, 5.2{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} speed, 2000 Hz

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and while our material database contains recommended settings for almost every type of material, the user may prefer to alter those settings to their own liking,” she adds.

There are quite a few benefits to using a laser system to create dimensional signage.

  • Smaller vacuum system for smoke removal
  • No need for dust collector
  • Smaller-sized machines takes up less shop space
  • Effluent/smoke coming off Precision Board HDU is NOT toxic (see more info below)
  • Generally lower price point for machines

You may be wondering if the smoke that comes off Precision Board HDU from laser-cutting is harmful or toxic.  It’s not.  We wanted to ensure that the effluent byproducts of Precision Board did not exceed OSHA’s Permissible Exposure Limits (PEL), federal regulations that dictate safe chemical exposure levels, so we had Universal Laser Systems test several densities of our material.  Universal Laser Systems used a sophisticated RTGA Mass Spectrometer and a carbon monoxide detector to monitor the levels of effluent at all times during testing. They noted the following in their report: “The concentration of the detected compounds did not exceed their respective OSHA PEL at any level of filtration during this study.”  You can read more about the testing HERE.

Find out more by watching the videos on our YouTube Channel showing different woodgrain patterns being laser-engraved onto our PBLT-20 and PBLT-30 densities of Precision Board HDU.

You may also be considering using a laser to create a sandblasted sign look without actually sandblasting it.  Creating a sign this way could potentially mean that you wouldn’t have to worry about:

  • Strict environmental regulations around sandblasting
  • The use of a grain frame
  • Using a blast mask to designate where sand should and should not hit the substrate
  • Wearing a suit or helmet to protect against sand particle ricochets
  • Purchasing a system to filter sand particles out of the air

Check out our resource page to read more about Laser-Engraving of Precision Board HDU, including our toxicity testing (Precision Board is non-toxic), as well as more videos and settings information for cutting or engraving Precision Board HDU.

You can request free samples and try creating a faux wood look on our HDU!  For technical questions on the use of lasers, please contact Trotec via the website link below.

Trotec Laser is a leading international provider of advanced, high-speed laser equipment for cutting, engraving and industrial marking, and a wide selection of engraving supplies. Trotec was originally founded in Wels, Austria in 1997 and established in the United States in Mississippi in 2002. Now headquartered in Plymouth, Michigan, the U.S. business has grown to 10 times its original size.

Coastal Enterprises manufactures Precision Board HDU, a versatile, cost-effective and eco-friendly urethane sign material that is particularly effective for making professional-looking indoor and outdoor dimensional signs.  It is a closed-cell rigid substrate that does not rot, warp or crack.  You can request free samples, get a quote or sign up for periodic newsletters packed with helpful information.

Breathing life into the Giving Tree

Coastal Enterprises, manufacturers of Precision Board HDU, is proud to host guest blogs written by some of the signage industry’s biggest movers and shakers, posted to the Precision Board Blog.  Terry with Lacombe Signmasters in Alberta, Canada, was tasked with creating a faux tree for a hospital donor wall and making it look 3D despite being attached to the wall.  He went with Precision Board HDU because he knew he could give the tree some depth and contours while trusting that the material would be durable enough to withstand frequent foot traffic and handling.

In Terry’s own words…

We do a fair amount of work for our local hospital in the area. We got word that they were looking for a unique sponsor wall for a local hospital emergency room renovation. They wanted a tree with leaves that would become part of the sponsorship opportunity. One of my designers is very creative. He had designed a tree that sits in our showroom and is a free-standing metal structure made with magic sculpt.  It has this Hundred Acre look from Winnie the Pooh. Customers come in and it gets them thinking outside the box.

When the hospital talked about a tree, we thought about the one we already had.  Since it couldn’t be freestanding, we knew it would need to be flat but dimensional. We wanted to use high-density urethane for the dimensional look so that people could touch it and feel it. We’ve used HDU before to give signs depth. The more we talked with them about it, the more we wanted to use Precision Board HDU…and we ended up getting the bid!

tree

The nice thing about Precision Board is that it routs really well. The router has an easy time with it.  It’s easy to cut through and easy to work with, but durable and able to handle the rigors of the sign business.

It also holds paint really well.  We have projects from five years ago where the paint still looks good.  These are the qualities we look for in our sign substrates. There’s really no other HDU out there that has the strength and durability of Precision Board.  Another factor is that other HDU suppliers don’t typically carry the higher densities like Coastal Enterprises does.

We used PBLT-20 for the tree project because this is an interior sign and it would be more economical for the client.  There are five parts to the tree- a main trunk and four branches.  We used our FlexiCam Router with Vectric Aspire software. Our total routing time was about nine hours.  We’ve had our CNC for about 15 years and it has served us well.  It’s a solid and really well built machine.

After routing, we primed the Precision Board with FSC-88 WB Primer from Coastal Enterprises. I just hand paint it on with a brush and do two coats, letting it dry in between coats.  It dries pretty fast. I did the priming myself on this project. We used a silver color paint that ended up looking very metallic. We though it would need to be darkened, but it didn’t. We use a hybrid paint from a Canadian company Para. Hybrid in the sense that it’s water-based, but dries to an enamel-oil type look. After that I did a wash on it, which is taking a paint and adding a clear base to it. When you add a clear base to a solid paint it makes it more translucent. The dark gets caught up in the darker recesses, so it gives it more shadow and depth. That wash looks really cool, especially on the trunk. When I wipe it off, the top parts stay light and the bottom parts get darker. We learned that technique from Dan Sawatzky of Imagination Corporation at one of his workshops six or seven years ago. It’s fun to do the whole creative thing with paints.

Once we had the wash on the material, we left it as is. It didn’t need a clear coat and also where it was an interior sign, there was no need for UV protection. I put an oil-based paint on the backside because we install with double-sided tape and silicon. We wanted to make sure the tape would grab really well. It gave it a nice surface to grab the material.

Pro-Tip: Play with your washes. Try different things. You can paint over and over until you get the right color.

It was a great project to work on and we loved how well the metallic look of the tree matched the look of the hospital.

tree

Lacombe Signmasters is a full service sign and Graphic shop nestled in the prairies of Central Alberta and a stone’s throw from the mountains.  Their tag line is ‘concept to completion’, providing logo design to installation of final product and everything in between.  They work out of a modern 3,000 sq ft building with over 50 years of sign, graphics and design experience.  With their vibrant, energetic and creative staff they strive to provide Central Alberta with unique vehicle graphics/wraps, wayfinding packages, interior and exterior commercial signage, store front, landmark signs and dimensional signage.  If you are in their area, please stop in for a visit. Just call ahead so they can have the coffee on @ (403) 782-7446.  You can visit their website at Signmasters.ca or follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Coastal Enterprises manufactures Precision Board HDU, a versatile, cost-effective and eco-friendly urethane sign material that is particularly effective for making professional-looking indoor and outdoor dimensional signs.  It is a closed-cell rigid substrate that does not rot, warp or crack.  You can request free samples, get a quote or sign up for periodic newsletters packed with helpful information.

Laser-Engraving Faux Wood into Precision Board HDU

A customer contacted us wondering if they could create a faux wood pattern on Precision Board HDU using their laser system.  They did not own a CNC and were trying to get a competitive advantage with what they had in house for equipment.  We reached out to our friends at Trotec Laser and asked them to have a go at creating a woodgrain look on Precision Board HDU using a laser…and the results are amazing!  Check out the photos and videos below and read more about how they did it.

faux wood

The first step that needed to be tackled was finding woodgrain patterns to program the software with.  Cameron Youngblood, Senior Marketing Specialist with Trotec Laser, searched online to find a collection of woodgrain patterns.

“Finding a high quality image is key to achieving an ideal and realistic end result. We found a few different free images that didn’t require a lot of editing or manipulation in our graphics software,” she says. “There are a couple of different approaches you can take to alter the image into a laser-ready graphic, and some of these approaches are dependent on the image itself. For example, finding an image that has multiple shades of blacks and grays may engrave better as a grayscale image.”

Cameron says more laser engraving power will be applied with the black areas and the power will decrease as you get into the various shades of gray- any white areas on the graphic will not be engraved. The more laser power is applied, the deeper the engraving area will be.

She cautions that it might take the user a little time to test out the settings, but as long as you can get a good image, it’s definitely possible to program your laser system to engrave a faux wood pattern into Precision Board HDU.

“Since the images we tested were black and white, we opted to use the color mapping option in our JobControl® laser software,” Youngblood said. “Color mapping allows you to assign different actions to each area of your graphic, as well as indicate the order in which each action should take place. In this instance, we used a total of three colors: one color for the deepest engraving, another color for the lighter engraving, and the third color for completely cutting through the material. This allowed us to achieve our preferred contrast between the two different engraving depths.”

Trotec Laser used their Speedy 400 120W CO2 laser on samples of PBLT-15 Precision Board HDU to get a faux wood look.

Here’s the settings info:

  • Engraving (first color) = 90{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} power, 60{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} speed, 1000 PPI
  • Engraving (second color) = 30{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} power, 100{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} speed, 500 PPI
  • Cutting (third color) = 100{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} power, 5.2{afbea94bd31582343c3017644f03ec8d7d8fa2386ecb82c250661e06c0c6e111} speed, 2000 Hz

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and while our material database contains recommended settings for almost every type of material, the user may prefer to alter those settings to their own liking,” she adds.

There are quite a few benefits to using a laser system to create dimensional signage.

  • Smaller vacuum system for smoke removal
  • No need for dust collector
  • Smaller-sized machines takes up less shop space
  • Effluent/smoke coming off Precision Board HDU is NOT toxic (see more info below)
  • Generally lower price point for machines

You may be wondering if the smoke that comes off Precision Board HDU from laser-cutting is harmful or toxic.  It’s not.  We wanted to ensure that the effluent byproducts of Precision Board did not exceed OSHA’s Permissible Exposure Limits (PEL), federal regulations that dictate safe chemical exposure levels, so we had Universal Laser Systems test several densities of our material.  Universal Laser Systems used a sophisticated RTGA Mass Spectrometer and a carbon monoxide detector to monitor the levels of effluent at all times during testing. They noted the following in their report: “The concentration of the detected compounds did not exceed their respective OSHA PEL at any level of filtration during this study.”  You can read more about the testing HERE.

Find out more by watching the videos on our YouTube Channel showing different woodgrain patterns being laser-engraved onto our PBLT-20 and PBLT-30 densities of Precision Board HDU.

You may also be considering using a laser to create a sandblasted sign look without actually sandblasting it.  Creating a sign this way could potentially mean that you wouldn’t have to worry about:

  • Strict environmental regulations around sandblasting
  • The use of a grain frame
  • Using a blast mask to designate where sand should and should not hit the substrate
  • Wearing a suit or helmet to protect against sand particle ricochets
  • Purchasing a system to filter sand particles out of the air

Check out our resource page to read more about Laser-Engraving of Precision Board HDU, including our toxicity testing (Precision Board is non-toxic), as well as more videos and settings information for cutting or engraving Precision Board HDU.

You can request free samples and try creating a faux wood look on our HDU!  For technical questions on the use of lasers, please contact Trotec via the website link below.

Trotec Laser is a leading international provider of advanced, high-speed laser equipment for cutting, engraving and industrial marking, and a wide selection of engraving supplies. Trotec was originally founded in Wels, Austria in 1997 and established in the United States in Mississippi in 2002. Now headquartered in Plymouth, Michigan, the U.S. business has grown to 10 times its original size.

Coastal Enterprises manufactures Precision Board HDU, a versatile, cost-effective and eco-friendly urethane sign material that is particularly effective for making professional-looking indoor and outdoor dimensional signs.  It is a closed-cell rigid substrate that does not rot, warp or crack.  You can request free samples, get a quote or sign up for periodic newsletters packed with helpful information.

This Faux Wood Precision Board HDU Sign was Hand-Carved!

Andrea Craig is the Lead Designer for JH Signs & Designs. Her client, True North Salon & Spa, wanted an outdoor woodsy feel to her sign, but without the hassle of frequent maintenance due to the harsh Minnesota weather. She decided to go with a sign that looked like wood, but would last a lot longer and require minimal upkeep. Andrea designed a faux wood sign using Precision Board HDU. She likes that she can get the wood look while avoiding issues of staining or rot. Read on to see how she achieved a faux wood look on high-density urethane with hand-carving tools and different types of paints.

faux wood

Andrea tells us, “we had some direction from the client and this was the 8th or 9th option. She really wanted the state of Minnesota to be part of it and we started with that in the background. We ended up putting it as the ampersand in the words.”  She added, “We wanted the outdoor feel without being too much outdoors and we really wanted her name to be readable.”

For Andrea, the biggest reason for using Precision Board HDU and making it look like wood was the maintenance factor.   “With real wood you have staining and longevity issues.  With HDU, you have the ‘it doesn’t rot’ factor.”  She added, “being in central Minnesota, you get a little north of us, you can get all kinds of real cool rough cut wood, but it needs maintenance.  Our client didn’t want to have to keep updating it every few years.”

Craig used PBLT-15 Precision Board high-density urethane.  She took two sheets cut to 48″ x 56″ and then glued them together. From there she used a pattern she had made to cut the top and bottom of the HDU to look like individual boards.  All the work was done by hand with a Dremel and various carving tools.

Outside of using a straight edge ruler to draw the straight lines indicating where the boards were supposedly separated, the rest of the patterns were all hand carved.  “I printed out a couple different wood patterns for reference,” she says.  “I didn’t want the ‘wood’ to look all the same.”

Andrea used Ronan Fast Dry Blockout White to prime the HDU.  She then used a mixture of 1 Shot Medium Brown, Ronan Black and Ronan White mixed to create the charcoal gray base color.  “From there I used different shades of light browns and grays to give each board a different color. I then layered different shades with a dry brush technique on each board to give depth and variation,” she added.

To finish off, she made a wash that was really thinned down to bring out the colors and enhance the wood grain.  After that, a Rustoleum Matte Clear Enamel spray was used to take the gloss off and make it more realistic with a matte texture before the metal went on.

The middle layer is actually an 1/8th inch poly metal with an Avery Supreme Wrapping Film Brushed Titanium wrap on it to make it look like metal without actually being metal.

The letters are laser cut acrylic from Gemini, stud-mounted with additional standoffs to get them off the metal a little bit more.

Total project time was about 8-10 hours to fabricate the entire sign and about two hours of hand carving time for the faux wood HDU portion of it.

Andrea has been using HDU off and on over the last thirteen years and her current boss has used it for at least 20 years.  She says, “with wood, you can have a vision, but not find what you’re looking for.  With HDU you can get the look you want.  It really opens the door to creativity.”  She says, “don’t be afraid to play with it.  You have to think outside the box. Pretty much nothing is off limits.”

faux wood

ABOUT JH SIGNS & DESIGNS

JH Signs & Designs is a small progressive company that believes that image is everything. “If your business looks good, business will be good.” They stand behind their products and have a firm belief that if you treat the customer right and have a great product, you never have to worry about having a happy customer.  They have been making and installing signs in Perham since 1999.  Trust the professional staff at JH Signs & Designs to use the best materials that will last and make your business have the professional image to guide your customers to your door.  You can visit their website or call them at (218) 346-7446.

ABOUT COASTAL ENTERPRISES

Coastal Enterprises manufactures Precision Board HDU, a versatile, cost-effective and eco-friendly urethane sign material that is particularly effective for making professional-looking indoor and outdoor dimensional signs.  It is a closed-cell rigid substrate that does not rot, warp or crack.  You can request free samples, get a quote or sign up for periodic newsletters packed with helpful information.