WELCOME!

It is hard to believe that it was almost ten years ago I witnessed a CNC router in action for the very first time. I was fascinated and simply had to have one! Although I had been in the creative end of the three dimensional sign business for most of my life I didn't really know what I would do with one of these machines - but I just knew it could do fantastic stuff.

Along with the CNC router I discovered the wonderful material called Precision Board and the glues, primers and other companion products they offer. Since then we have gone through many tons of the material using it in most signs and projects we tackle. This journal will chronicle our many adventures both past, present and future. I'll talk from the perspective of someone who pushes these products to the creative limit on a daily basis. I'll be adding to the stories two or three times each week. -dan

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Kenna's name plaque

Kenna's name plaque was next up. I decided on a simple oval with a casual, brush style lettering. Once the vectors were done I created a flat oval relief to start with. 


The flat oval relief was then modified by dooming up the centre portion.


To add texture with a batman I imported the bitmap which sized automatically to the bounding box. I resized it so that the finish bit ( 1/8"  -  0.125" diameter) would easily fit into the black portion which would remain low. I did this by eyeball using the border of the lettering (which I knew was 1/5" -  0.2" )






Then I added a second texture to the relief. To illustrate what I selected I did this screen capture. The outside oval is the base relief. The next blue one in is the raised dome. With both selected the texture will only go inside this area. Inside that is the lettering border in red. The red means the texture won't go here. On the areas inside the red (blue lines inside the letters) the texture will again be placed.


With the splotches bitmap placed over the file it looks like this... a little harder to see all the lines.



The lettering was raised last by modifying the base relief one last time



Then the file was blasted off to the MultiCam and the machine did it's magic.