Denser, more durable wood is usually more expensive than the lighter/engineered wood types. To route harder wood with a CNC router or engraver will take about 4 x longer & routing bits will get dull much quicker – resulting in higher cost on these harder woods

We use three different types of wood |

Engineered Wood

Soft Wood

Hard Wood 

This is a man-made artificial product, manufactured from wood off-cuts such as veneers & fibres. Engineered wood is one of the most cost-effective types of “woods” and is much cheaper than real wood. It also has the advantage that it can be cut much quicker than real / hardwoods. It is the most suited wood for painting. MDF engineered wood is available in, other than the standard yellowish brown, a total of 9 pastel colours, either 5 or 16mm. Normal brown MDF is available in thicknesses of 3mm-30mm, and come in a sheet size of 2750 x 1830mm – this is the most common engineered wood we use. We can also pre mix colours to spray paint your MDF cut-outs to specific Pantone colours, where will charge you a setup fee, and pricing will depend on total square meter coverage thereafter. 

Softwood is sourced from evergreen trees with pin needle-type leaves. Worldwide there are about 600 different varieties of softwood of which about only 40 are used commercially. The advantage of this type of wood is that it is not artificially manufactured and that it looks the part of being a hardwood, especially when varnished, without breaking the bank (or our routing bits). The most commonly found softwood in our industry is Pine or European redwood.

When we refer to hardwoods, we refer to durable, long-lasting woods. Different from softwoods, hardwood comes from trees that lose their leaves annually. As a result of the extreme durability & density of this wood, cutting & engraving of patterns, shapes & letters takes quite a bit longer to complete than engineered or softwood. Hardwood is commonly used when manufacturing chopping blocks, durable plaques & any indoor signage where you prefer the beautifully intricate patterns that hardwoods tend to hold. 

Different than soft/engineered woods, hardwoods are not supplied in full, big sheets, but rather strips of about 200-300mm wide & 5-6 meter in length, which is also variable from wood to wood. 

Our average lead time is about  4-5 working days after layout approval & payment received. Any intricate/specific requests will take longer to complete. Should you want your wood sprayed with a Pantone colour, it takes about 2 working days for the paint to be mixed. Thus custom painted wood cut-outs & panels will take about 5-7 working days.

In the case where you request us to work with rare wood, we will request you supply the wood to us.

You are most welcome to supply your own, but we do not take responsibility if something out of our control happens (power interruptions, moisture in wood, etc)

On our routing bed, we are limited to 1.3 x 2.5 m, on our laser engraver we are limited to 1.3 m x 0.9m 

We can cut up to 25mm thick pieces of wood. Should your requirements be more than this, we can glue two pieces of wood (recommended on engineered wood only) together, a hairline seam will be visible.

we use either aluminum stand-offs (4-6 per depending on the size of the wooden sign) which are visible from the front  or 2-3 screws mounted at the back of the motives (not visible from the front)