This particular Workshop name plaque was to have a hidden message. Our friend, Doug, loves weathered metal with rivets and that also happens to be one of our specialties! He also claims to be a member of the 'Blind Magicians of the Orient' — whatever that is. Dan decided this name plaque would look like it had been salvaged from a derelict ship. It would be slightly warped and some of the rivets would be missing; the same might be said of Doug of course. The raised rivets would spell 'MAGIC' — in braille. As always, Dan did a quick sketch in his book to work out the basics of the name plaque’s design.

Next he created a vector file and then a 3D file in EnRoute. Once he had created the flat reliefs, he imported a bitmap texture from our Texture magic: Classic Collection. EnRoute reads the shades of white, grey and black and assigns them height values depending on their value. When adding to a relief, white is highest, grays in between and black stays low. As you can see, this file creates a wave when it is done.

The rivet were simple domed reliefs and the lettering was a flat relief.

As always, Dan routed it from 30 lbs. Precision Board high density urethane (HDU).

Dan tool pathed the file in two passes. The first rough pass was 3/8" ball nose bit. The final pass was done using a 1/8" ball nose bit. He ran our CNC router at 300 inches per minute. The file took about an hour to complete. This will be a fun piece to paint and age properly!