Made a Plaque!

My friend asked if I could make this as a gift for her boyfriend, who is a volunteer firefighter.
It’s about 7.5 inches in height and I used the Proof-grade Walnut Plywood & glued it with Gorilla Wood glue. The glue left a tiny bit of residue, but you wouldn’t catch it unless looking for it.

So excited for him to see it!

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That is a beautiful piece! He’s going to love it… :sunglasses:

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Really beautiful!

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You mean you used the Walnut, right? Fantastic project! I’m always curious when projects like this are made, so I’ll ask - did you engrave the places that you placed the name, border, ladder etc.? Seriously, this is pretty amazing!

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Ah yes, the walnut! And I didn’t engrave the spots, but that would have totally saved me time with lining things up! I’m definitely using that suggestion for future work. :+1:t4:

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Haha, definitely glad to give you the suggestion, because I’ve lately been making tie pins and this has helped me a ton when placing the pin onto the print, but also I’ve seen a few other posts mentioning that they also did it.

The walnut is my favorite wood, in fact I’m gonna run a print on some in a little bit :wink:

Scoring the outline of the pieces you want to glue on also helps and is a lot quicker than engraving. :slight_smile: It doesn’t give you a pocket to put them in but it does provide a nice alignment guide.

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This is more for everyone, but is there any reason why one wouldn’t just cut/engrave this all out of one piece, rather than have to place/align the other pieces?

@forhorsman Engraving is not gonna give you the overall smooth finish that you see here. Now, if you had a CNC router…

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When you’re referring to the smooth finish, are you referring to the bottom/lower surface of the piece, or are you talking about the ‘outline’ of the extrusions?

If I’m understanding you correctly, this would then be made up of two layers of wood and adhered together? One layer as just the base shape, and another layer comprising the outline/border, and all the other extrusions?

Different end results but doable. I’d use solid walnut and engrave around the letters/objects.

Or I’d do it this way but make the add-ons out of contrasting wood like maple.

Not better or worse, just different effects.

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Engraving a single piece of wood will give you a lot of char and the area surrounding the letters will be very rough. CNC routing a single piece of wood will give you a smoother finish, especially if you use a ball endmill. However, as @jamesdhatch said, it’s just a different effect.

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Yes, it’s made out of two layers. I preferred the 3D look and didn’t really want the letters to be rough. Using a different wood to contrast would have made the top layer pop out more, but I liked the subtle classy look of using the same wood layered on top.

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Looks great! I don’t know if you meant to or not, but I really like how you cut out the “820” with the grain in a diagonal direction. It looks nice like that.

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I like the dimension of the layers too. Nice work! :sunglasses:

Very nice! :grinning:

Beautiful honor to him and impressive work you have done!

Wow, this is really beautiful!!

3d effect… laser etching cuts away at material but gluing pieces from to the etched out areas gives a nice 3d effect like normal signs…

Thats very cool, heres what i made for a friend who recently retired from his job too.IMG_2312|440x500

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