Painting v-carved letters

[Davo]

I notice all you guys somehow get your letters painted inside the cut area, how are yall doing that, masking before cutting then painting?

I've also seen the art itself painted different colors.

Curious as I surely do not do pen tracing

[phil_o]

There has been numerous postings on this topic on this forum and the Vectric forum. If you Google for painting V-carve lettering Vectric forum or painting V-carve lettering Shopbot forum you should find multiple answers to your question.

Phil

[Kyle Stapleton]

http://100kschools.org/blog/2014/09/adventures-of-a-high-school-cam-class-episode-6/

[Davo]

Thanks, I will take a look

[James M]

Kyle,

Thanks for the link.

James

[phil_o]

Take a look at this thread on the Vectric forum. http://forum.vectric.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=22536

Phil

[Chuck Keysor]

Davo:

I thickness my stock, but make it a couple of inches extra wide and long, to facilitate clamping to the table top. I varnish it, then V-carve, then re-varnish if the wood is porous to prevent paint being sucked into little pores and showing up in places where it ruins the job. Then I wipe on the paint, and then wipe off the excess right away. Latex paint is terrible with this approach. I can't get it all off, no matter how fast I work, which results in lots of sanding, that then gunks up the v-carving. I instead use oil based paint, which with its long drying time makes it easy to wipe off the excess. And then with a little paint thinner on a rag, you can 100% remove any residue.

I paint the lightest colors first, and when those are done, I mask them with painters tape, and paint and clean up the darker color. After all the darker paint is fully cleaned up, I can remove the masking tape, and do a last wipe down with paint thinner, to get rid of the paint residue around where the edges of the tape were.... Again, taking care to not get any dark residue down into the lighter colored letter V-carving. Then I put on another thin coat of varnish over the entire plaque.

Now, the above is all old discussion many others have posted before. But on the most recent plaque I made (pictured), I did something a bit different, that was quite helpful.

In the past, keeping a flat board for V-carving has been very dicey. The white oak I use, has been dried in my attic for 15 years. I can bring it to the shop, and let it acclimate for a few days, but somehow, after varnishing, even varnishing both front and back, to keep equal tensions, the board will warp ever so slightly. And with a 5/8" thick oak board, it is hard to fight back......... sometimes requiring breaking the text into different areas, and re-zeroing each text area...... (I had to do that when carving a long set of quotes from a Lincoln speech......)

This time, the board I wanted to use, had an interesting grain pattern, so I decided to cut the stock into two thin pieces, and "book match" the two halves. That left me with wood that was too thin. (I band-sawed these, and my old blade wandered,,,, so by the time I had thickness planed the two boards down to even thicknesses, they were not even quite 1/4" thick.) So, I glued them onto a piece of MDF, then thickness planed the oak side of my glue-up. I had in effect, veneered the MDF substrate, and as a result, had NO problem with the board warping. And I left the MDF oversized to provide easy attachment to my Bot table.

I usually put a bevel on the front side of these plaques, to make the piece appear lighter, and less like a plank of lumber. In this case, with the reduced thickness of the white oak, I couldn't do that. I had planned to frame the plaque. But at the last minute, I decided to put a bevel on the BACK side. That makes the plaque look thin and light, yet the thickness of the MDF hold the oak face out from the wall, so it looks like it is floating. The bevel, which is on the MDF, is painted black, and it turned out very nicely.

The general problem I have with the paint and wipe approach, is the crispness of the V-carved text is compromised by glopping the grooves full of paint. Some fonts it is less distracting. On other super crisp fonts, loosing the sharp bottoms of the V-carving is more distressing. Spraying paint instead of wiping fights that problem, but then it won't wipe off for me because it dries so fast. And I get paint that does spray and dry slowly, wiping it gunks up the V-carving anyway.

(A specific annoyance with this plaque, though not related to the issue at hand, is that I had originally planned to cut my stock down, so that the divider/horizontal divider line, sat on top of the joint line.......... But the board looked so nice, I didn't have the heart to cut it down, so the divider line would fall on top of the joint. I tried to monkey with my layout, to keep the larger board, and get the divider to lay on top of the seam,,,, and everything just looked clunky, so I said humbug, and said, who will notice! Every time I look at the picture, I see the joint line, and wish I would have cut the board down, so as to reposition the horizontal line to hide the seam. (The joint line is perfectly tight, that was not the issue, it is simply that the different grain patterns coming together creates a competing/distracting horizontal element in the design.))

Also, I cut this with a 90 degree CMT V-bit, and was quite pleased with the cut quality. For the varnish, I used a can of "Tung" oil. I had bought the can in 1988, but had never opened it, and it still worked fine.
Sorry for rambling a bit, since most of this post didn't really bear on the direct subject. Chuckhttp://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=25248&stc=1