CNC Shark Forum

Here is the final product of a sign carved into PVC trim board. The PVC boards take paint very well. Plan your carving well, hold your zero and have a way to relocate the piece and the painting can be relatively easy. Any questions?

Very nice! What is the actual size?

Hi! This sign is 16 inches in diameter and is 3/4” thick. It is made from (3) pieces nominal 1x8 trim board edge glued together.

Thanks.

Turned out very sharp. Nice paint job, too, with great contrast.

Thanks! I think the key was getting the black pretty much perfect. 4 coats flat black brushed on with orbital sanding after coat 3 and 4. Then sprayed flat black. Then 2 coats of sprayed acrylic matte clear finish. The other colors were brushed on acrylics. The white is the natural color of the PVC material.

What did you use for glue? A wood glue or pvc solvent type glue? Excellent work, but I wouldn’t expect any less from you.

Thanks Eagle. I use the white Gorilla glue. Works really well with Azek and PVC trim boards. In the past I used it to fix an error in a PVC board project. Takes paint well.

I would be interested to know
1: What program do you use for carving?
2: What bits did you use?
3: Are the letters raised?

I am especially interested in #3 as I am using only Vcarve desktop and see many processes that are not available to me.

Thanks,
NL7U

I'm going to guess at the answers and BillK can tell me where I'm off.

1. VCarve (or Aspire, if that's what he has, but he didn't need any of Aspire's features for this beyond what VCarve already has)
2. Looks like a 1/4" end mill for the cut out and a 90-degree v-bit for the lettering
3. Those are definitely cut letters, rather than raised, but there's no reason you couldn't do raised instead. See VCarve's prism tool.

Kayvon wrote:I'm going to guess at the answers and BillK can tell me where I'm off.

1. VCarve (or Aspire, if that's what he has, but he didn't need any of Aspire's features for this beyond what VCarve already has) -Aspire is what I have, but yes, V-carve would be fine for this.


2. Looks like a 1/4" end mill for the cut out and a 90-degree v-bit for the lettering
3. Those are definitely cut letters, rather than raised, but there's no reason you couldn't do raised instead. See VCarve's prism tool.

2 and 3 are generally correct. I actually planned these cuts to make the painting easy. The material is white, so the letters were V-cut through the black. For the center part I did cut outs of the color sections using a 1/4" bit to clear and 1/8" to finish.Then painted two coats of the colors with the outer edges masked off. Back into the shark and used a 1/2" dia cutter to clear and a 1/4" to finish just a shallow pocket that exposed the white for the stick figures. Two coats of clear matte acrylic over. 4 coats of flat black were brushed on, sanded smooth, then 1 sprayed on. So this was actually in and out of the machine 3 times. Once to flatten the three boards that I glued up to make this, out for black paint, in for pocket carving, out for color painting, in for letter cutting and center pocket as above, out for final clear matte.