Last year when I first joined SLMS I was asked by friends to help design table name signs for their wedding. The theme for their table names was fried chicken shops, one of which was the venue for their first date.
I wanted to recreate the logos for each of the chicken shops using the laser cutter. To give the signs a “3D” aspect, I decided that I wanted to build-up the signs with layers of laser cut plywood.
Unfortunately only one of the chicken shops had an SVG of their logo on their website. Therefore, my first challenge was creating vectors based on the bitmap logos for the other chicken shops. This was relatively straightforward with the trace bitmap feature in Inkscape.
To give the signs some “weight” I decided to make the back-boards out of 9mm laser ply. I also engraved the detail of the logo onto the back-boards to act as a guide when gluing on the next layer:
I then used 3mm laser ply to build out the logo details for that “3D” effect. The Chick ‘n’ Sours logo was the only three-layer logo, I managed to get away with just two on the other signs:
I used cheap, simple spray paint to paint the individual components of the signs. It was a little laborious to use a spray primer and subsequently sand the components before spraying with coloured paint, but ultimately it worked well!
Assembly was straight-forward using the etched backboards. I tried using wood glue and super glue and concluded that wood glue was more forgiving and easier to wipe-up when too much was applied.
I had considered making stands for them, but in the end opted for some plastic stands from Amazon, which I was very happy with.
Lessons learned:
- I wasn’t happy with Ruby’s SLMS settings for 9MM ply (post with my “improved” settings)
- Super glue is unforgiving, particularly when it bleeds onto spray painted material
- Using masking / transfer tape to stabilise small components for spray painting is brilliant!
