CNC Sign

About six months ago I bought a cnc machine. I have wanted one for a long time and had finally saved up enough money. I have made a few small things on the machine before I got confident enough to start using nice wood. I had a scrap of Walnut that I wanted to use but not waste.

A song I love is called It Is Well, Long story short I love it because the writer of the song lost his entire family who were traveling the ocean to be with him and they perished. Filled with grief he wrote It Is Well. If you aren't familiar with this song you should check it out.

I decided I wanted a little sign to put on my desk with this phrase engraved in it. It would serve as a nice little reminder throughout the day. If you are interested in making one I shared the project file on invetables website.

1. CNC machine

2. Spray Paint

3. Sandpaper

4. Finish

So the CNC machine I have is the x-carve from inventables. It was one of the cheaper models and had a lot of good reviews. I made the design in Illustrator with my favorite font. Inventables has a great software called easel where you can design in but it is a little limiting. I saved my design as an svg and used easel to carve it into my piece of wood.

Since it was so small the carve only took 12 mins.

The piece of Walnut I had was a little long so I used a circular saw to cut it to length.

I used semi-gloss white spray paint from Rustoleum. I like how this type of paint looks. I let the spray paint pool into the groves so that it would be soaked in and covered. I used a lot so when I sanded off the excess the inside would be fine.

Once the paint was completely dry I used 120 grit sand paper to remove the excess paint. An added bonus was that the spray paint went into some of the grooves of the wood grain and left a cool looking effect.

I used a nylon brush to remove all the sawdust from the engraving. Once it was all out I used spray lacquer to seal this up. As you can see in the photo it made that walnut pop as well as the painted parts in the wood.

I love how this sign came out! The white paint contrasts really nicely the color of the wood. I made this sort of small since it was gonna sit on my desk but you could easily scale this to any size you wanted.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or if you make one.