Brick Smoke Stack...out of wood! But what kind?

[LV LOU]

I see what you're trying to achieve but not sure I understand the logic so here's my 2 cents. First, I think dying it would bring out the grain more, like staining does, and that is what you're trying to avoid. Wouldn't the birch grain show up more if stained? I don't think dye would give you any better contrast pre-applied and then burned. I've been wrong too many times to claim this as fact though so I'm open to correction.

Depending on the depth of the burns I would think painting it, then powdering the mortar, then touching up the surface of the original paint would look awesome and the coat of paint strengthens the bricks. If you look at his painted one you'll see where bricks have flaked off. This is realistic if it only shows sporadically. But you'd be amazed how fragile lasered wood bricks are. Paint will help "glue" them in place.

Would the grain show up more if stained? Who knows,it's just a suggestion...But it's certainly worth a shot when all you're talking about is a 50 cent dowel,and a few minutes of laser time to find out..Could look fantastic,could be garbage..What's to lose?

[Alaska Railroader]

Would the grain show up more if stained? Who knows,it's just a suggestion...But it's certainly worth a shot when all you're talking about is a 50 cent dowel,and a few minutes of laser time to find out..Could look fantastic,could be garbage..What's to loose?

As a laser owner/operator what I know I can lose are expensive mirrors and lenses if something is painted before burning. Since this isn't my project I will lose nothing. My concerns were simply for this gentleman's laser. Staining it will not hurt the lenses while burning. Finding just the right color of dye to make everyone happy and then dying every dowel before lasering would be very time consuming and tedious when all you want to do is to move onto the next project.

It's not my circus and not my monkeys (sorry Kiz). My message was really geared towards David. But I probably didn't tell him anything he didn't already know so my apologies for jumping in.

[Kisatchie]

...It's not my circus and not my monkeys (sorry Kiz)....

Hmm... I am a Great Ape,
not some lowly monkey...

[peteski]

It's not my circus and not my monkeys (sorry Kiz). My message was really geared towards David. But I probably didn't tell him anything he didn't already know so my apologies for jumping in.

Karin,
It doesn't look like David has any complaints about your comments.  I wouldn't take other comments so personally. They are probably from people who do not own or work with a laser cutter (like you do).  I don't own a laser cutter and I found your input very informative. I also think it would be interesting to see how acrylic or urethane would engrave.  I still think that using wood for representing non-wood surfaces is not optimal. The wood-grain and "fuzz" increase the number of steps involved to obfuscate the fact that the brick is made from wood.  But that is also simply my own opinion.

[Alaska Railroader]

Peteski, you are right on about the wood trying to represent something non wood. All of us who laser have this dilemma and have to make tough choices on materials. I agreed with you about the acrylic rod, that would be my #1 choice. It is the material I used to laser tiny bricks for the TownBuilder series that DKS and I did. The bricks had brick-like texture without depending on an existing rough texture like wood.

Thank you for the comments. Because you said this I will throw in one more observation and will apologize ahead of time. Here goes... am I the only one who noticed the twisting effect of the raster pattern on the right side primered etched dowel in post number 21? This is unavoidable and not a fault of the operator or his settings. It is the physics of the machine and we all have to deal with it, rotary or no rotary.

I commend David for his nice brick work and I love watching fellow laser guys stretch the limits with their machine.

To Kiz. I stand corrected. You are great, ape or not 

[LV LOU]

As a laser owner/operator what I know I can lose are expensive mirrors and lenses if something is painted before burning. Since this isn't my project I will lose nothing. My concerns were simply for this gentleman's laser. Staining it will not hurt the lenses while burning. Finding just the right color of dye to make everyone happy and then dying every dowel before lasering would be very time consuming and tedious when all you want to do is to move onto the next project.

It's not my circus and not my monkeys (sorry Kiz). My message was really geared towards David. But I probably didn't tell him anything he didn't already know so my apologies for jumping in.

Okay..I understand the paint problem,so I came up with another suggestion.Dye is just color,shouldn't harm anything,now,it's going to be too hard to find the right color,and keep everybody happy...Seems you just don't want to try anything,it's too hard.Why bother trying to give anybody ideas,it's just not gonna work...

[DKS]

Okay..I understand the paint problem,so I came up with another suggestion.Dye is just color,shouldn't harm anything,now,it's going to be too hard to find the right color,and keep everybody happy...Seems you just don't want to try anything,it's too hard.Why bother trying to give anybody ideas,it's just not gonna work...

Lou, for starters, dye will tend to enhance the wood grain--it will act just like stain, and it's already been established that enhancing the grain is not a desired result. But as to the other points, it does no good to put down a professional laser artist because she doesn't want to try something she knows will not produce good results. Sorry if it sounds as if nobody wants to try your ideas, but not all ideas will work, and in this case somebody else has already tried them and found they do not produce good results.

Honestly, I don't get what the problem is with painting the chimney after it's lasered. A good-quality paint will not obscure detail, but it will indeed hide the wood grain. And any number of tricks can be used to bring out the mortar lines, including chalks.

An overriding consideration to all of this, however, is that the majority of industrial chimneys are tapered. Some are cylindrical, yes, but the vast majority of round ones are not. In the larger picture, round chimneys are among a number of other prevalent shapes, such as square, hexagonal, octagonal, etc., and again, the majority of these are tapered, often with flares or other decorative features at the top. Just something to think about along the way from Point A to B.

[peteski]

Okay..I understand the paint problem,so I came up with another suggestion.Dye is just color,shouldn't harm anything,now,it's going to be too hard to find the right color,and keep everybody happy...Seems you just don't want to try anything,it's too hard.Why bother trying to give anybody ideas,it's just not gonna work...

Wow, TRW members are no longer allowed to give opinions when they feel that some idea is not going to work?  I've voiced my doubts about many ideas posted on TRW and I don't recall anybody jumping on me like this.  I think that it is really up to David to decide which methods he will use.

[Alaska Railroader]

Lou, for starters, dye will tend to enhance the wood grain--it will act just like stain, and it's already been established that enhancing the grain is not a desired result. But as to the other points, it does no good to put down a professional laser artist because she doesn't want to try something she knows will not produce good results. Sorry if it sounds as if nobody wants to try your ideas, but not all ideas will work, and in this case somebody else has already tried them and found they do not produce good results.

Honestly, I don't get what the problem is with painting the chimney after it's lasered. A good-quality paint will not obscure detail, but it will indeed hide the wood grain. And any number of tricks can be used to bring out the mortar lines, including chalks.

An overriding consideration to all of this, however, is that the majority of industrial chimneys are tapered. Some are cylindrical, yes, but the vast majority of round ones are not. In the larger picture, round chimneys are among a number of other prevalent shapes, such as square, hexagonal, octagonal, etc., and again, the majority of these are tapered, often with flares or other decorative features at the top. Just something to think about along the way from Point A to B.

This.

Wow, TRW members are no longer allowed to give opinions when they feel that some idea is not going to work?  I've voiced my doubts about many ideas posted on TRW and I don't recall anybody jumping on me like this.  I think that it is really up to David to decide which methods he will use.

This.

...Seems you just don't want to try anything,it's too hard....

This - is so opposite of what I do and believe

[CacheJunction]

Didn't mean to be uninvolved. My laptop died and had to buy an new one. Trying to catch up on the conversation. I will try to clear some things up the best I can, if I understand what everyone is saying. First, in looking at the actual unpainted, unprimed dowel, the grain adds very little to the texture. The bricks are 3d engraved, meaning almost every brick is engraved at different heights. Almost all of the dark patterns you see are due to the random texturing of the individual bricks.



So actually after it is engraved, a stain might work. There is a chance you wouldn't notice the grain in the birch. So the darker bricks are just rastered more, and so have been burned more. Any dye, paint, stain, or anything would be rastered away, because virtually the entire surface has material removed. But again, the stain might work. A guy who bought one of my brick stations was going to build it without painting the brick because he liked the bare look of it so much. I hope he sends me pictures...



It didn't turn out well in on the stack, but the method I used was Bragdon Enterprises old brick powder mixed with paint thinner. I brush it on until I don't see any color coming through. If there is primer underneath, it gives it a dark red color. No primer gives it an orangish tint. This is a laserboard wall without primer underneath:



After it is dry I brush the surface to get rid of excess powder. Most of it bonds to the surface when applied wet. I did a rush job so you can see some spots where the powder is still clogging the mortar lines. Then I coat the surface with bottled Dullcoat to create the mortar. Again, if I am in a rush, I am not careful and the Dullcoat pools, and you don't get the white effect; it actually looks a little shiny. The wall in the above picture turned out perfect, in my opinion. The Dullcoat coating was light and even (no pools) when I applied it. I think I can get that effect with the stack when I try again. I will take my time and show the results. The key seems to be to just wet the surface without pooling.

If I understand what you are talking about with the twisting effect, that is normal and shows up even when I raster my flat brick texture sheets. It is a trick of the eye when the surface is monochrome and there is more shadowing. What looks like an angled line of bricks is actually a random pattern of bricks that are cut at different depths, but are all lower than the surrounding ones so appears as a line. The effect disappears after it is painted and weathered:



Here you can more clearly see the different heights of the brick. The white is the Dullcoat and you can see I did a terrible job compared to the wall above. I posted it because I thought the overall piece looked heavily weathered and so no overall unpleasant.

Do you guys have any pictures of scale sized brick in acrylic or something? I am interested in comparing. Like I said, I have a taste for the wood look, but maybe I haven't seen good acrylic brick.

[DKS]

A few years back I collaborated with Stonebridge to develop a series of structure kits. We dipped our toes in the laser-etched acrylic pool as a means to create masters that would be replicated with casting resin. We'd in fact tried a number of different materials, and acrylic was the winner by a long shot. As we explored different etching techniques, we found that acrylic also afforded us a level of precision that allowed us to replicate not only scale sized bricks, but also brick effects, including varying depth and decorative touches.

I chose as my first experiment an N scale model of a real enginehouse in Central New Jersey. I basically replicated it in artwork brick-for-brick.









It provided a great learning experience (indeed, looking at the photos above has me thinking about all of the changes I'd make to improve everything) that allowed us to fine-tune the process and take it down to Z scale. The same techniques--with many new twists--were then used to produce a series of Z scale kits that featured more than just brick.













Lately we've been floating more new ideas to both improve the effects we've already created and add new ones as well. To be honest, as rewarding as it was developing intricate brickwork, it was even more exciting to see the potential for stone effects. I feel as if we'd only just scratched the surface.

To me, acrylic provides a far greater degree of control--not only for etching very precise mortar lines, but also surface textures. Like everything else, real brick exhibits a wide range of surface texture: some has a fairly high degree of roughness, whereas other types of brick are quite smooth. The roughness can be reproduced on the acrylic by rastering techniques, while a coat of flat paint on clean acrylic very nicely simulates smoother brick. But we can also simulate with a high degree of accuracy the surface texture of brownstone, cinder block, rough-cut granite and many others, as well as vary surface depth for greater three-dimensionality, all on a single piece of acrylic.

While I do like the effects of rastering wood to make more rugged-looking brick, it's not that easy to make more precise, smooth brickwork that's also found on many urban buildings. Not to mention the laser time required: every piece of wood must be burned to make product, whereas acrylic is rastered just once, and the strength of resin casting can then be leveraged for mass production. IMO, YMMV, etc., of course.

[CacheJunction]

First of all, thank you for sharing those pictures. I love the designs, and the painting is amazing, especially on the z scale buildings. I have a lot to learn about painting and weathering.

Other than the remarkable design and paint jobs, these are the brick surfaces I have seen before. I think they look really great. They are just not for me. I think I am wired to find wood more 'believable' when used to represent stone. Many of us do, and we are willing to invest in the higher price difference. Now, if I wanted to do marble, or painted brick, I would probably turn to acrylic. The bank is probably my favorite, since it looks like a shiny marble surface.

I still think that using wood for representing non-wood surfaces is not optimal. The wood-grain and "fuzz" increase the number of steps involved to obfuscate the fact that the brick is made from wood. 

I don't understand. One coat of paint hides any grain, and if I know what you meaning by 'fuzz', that is exactly what makes it look realistic to me. It is why I chose wood instead of acrylic. Of course, I have to qualify this by saying I prefer old brick to new brick. Most brick walls I find fun to model have different color brick, and the fuzz helps provide the overall effect I am seeking. To me it is not about optimal anyway, but about creating the effect that looks "right" to me. What you said you want to hide (which I understand is a personal preference) I want to keep. A coat of paint and a coat of Dullcoat for mortar lines is what I'm shooting for and I think that is an acceptable number of steps 

...the potential for stone effects. I feel as if we'd only just scratched the surface.

But surely you've seen the stone, rock, and mortar effects obtained on wood and laserboard, and on a single piece. I was very happy with the stone texture on my station foundation, which appeared very precise and accurately detailed, to me anyway. The weathering effects I found extremely satisfying, and again, to my eye (not everyone's) it makes me forget its wood. Has acrylic really cornered the market on this, or is this a matter of aesthetics and personal preference (I'm hoping this is a rhetorical question  )

To me, acrylic provides a far greater degree of control--not only for etching very precise mortar lines, but also surface textures. Like everything else, real brick exhibits a wide range of surface texture: some has a fairly high degree of roughness, whereas other types of brick are quite smooth. The roughness can be reproduced on the acrylic by rastering techniques, while a coat of flat paint on clean acrylic very nicely simulates smoother brick. But we can also simulate with a high degree of accuracy the surface texture of brownstone, cinder block, rough-cut granite and many others, as well as vary surface depth for greater three-dimensionality, all on a single piece of acrylic.

I can't tell if you are saying only acrylic can do this. I have found wood and laserboard are excellent at all of this. Do you mean greater control as far as resin casting, or in general? I would defer to your opinion on resin casting.

...it's not that easy to make more precise, smooth brickwork that's also found on many urban buildings.

Again, this is not my experience. When I was trying to learn brick, I first produced clean brick with precise mortar lines. The precision and smoothness was the issue I had with it. I spent hours trying to get it to look like it does now. I know you are not trying to offend: I don't think you are implying that what I found very difficult to do, investing hours of time and experimentation, is actually just the natural effect of laser on sloppy, grainy wood surface  .

Oh, I meant to mention earlier, I have not found the wood brick to be fragile. You said some of the brick had flaked off, which was not the case. Either I had not brushed away the powder well enough, or the brick was rastered away.

Bottom line: I'm a wood guy. I don't think everyone should be, but for a wood guy, I am excited about being able to do wood brick smoke stacks! Whew!

[DKS]

I think I am wired to find wood more 'believable' when used to represent stone...

I'm not wired this way.

I know what you meaning by 'fuzz', that is exactly what makes it look realistic to me...

Sadly, to me it often looks too much like wood. On some occasions it's pleasing, particularly when the finishing work is done well, but not in every case. And wood presents some finishing issues: you can keep stripping and repainting resin until you get it right; that won't work for wood.

But surely you've seen the stone, rock, and mortar effects obtained on wood and laserboard...

Yes, and I keep coming back to acrylic. Just a personal preference.

Bottom line: I'm a wood guy. I don't think everyone should be, but for a wood guy, I am excited about being able to do wood brick smoke stacks! Whew!

I won't deny the appeal of wood, trust me! But for our purposes, wood simply wasn't an option. Just a few examples why: Wood (and any porous material, including laserboard) has to be completely sealed in order to serve as a master for casting. If the seal isn't perfect, the mold will fail. Sealing it that well without loss of detail is a real challenge.

Among other things, acrylic offers the option of being able to be precision-milled in order to make complex sub-assemblies for casting, and the edges of acrylic parts can be mitered down to a perfect razor-edge 45-degree angle, with no fraying. With few exceptions, every building front in the Z scale kit line was cast as a single piece, whereas the master was sometimes assembled from dozens of parts--like those cornices--and some of those parts weren't much larger than a pinhead (this greatly-enlarged image clearly shows my own flaws assembling the master!):



There's a practical size limit at which wood can be cleanly and reliably be cut or rastered, whereas acrylic can take detail as small as the laser can render. I may be wrong, but I have a feeling it would be a tall order to reproduce in wood some of the effects we've done in acrylic, and survive the scrutiny of micro-photography.



And some surfaces had to be grain-free in order to be realistic--such as a tile floor.



Then there's the practicality of production. You can't deny lasering each brick kit can be a time-sucking monster. Some of the more complex parts we've cut have taken well over an hour to raster (IRRC, the enginehouse front took over two and a half hours); doing that for every kit would make them prohibitively costly, tie up the laser for long periods (when it could instead be used to develop new product), and needlessly add wear and tear to an expensive machine.



I could add more, but I don't want to beat this to death. Bottom line, I'm not saying it's wrong to laser wood; I'm simply pointing out some of its limitations. Acrylic suited our aesthetics and supported our production style in ways wood simply could not.

Regardless, I applaud you for pushing the envelope in other ways.

[CacheJunction]

Ah, wait. You're trolling, right? Is this trolling? I don't spend much time on forums so I have been puzzling over your style of interaction. My kids tell me that people who troll do the things you are doing. I had my suspicions when you were responding to LV LOU and he finally got fed up. Now I think you have confirmed it for me.

Oh...just looked the definition up:  "...a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in online communities to sow discord or evoke an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion"

(Might want to cut LV LOU some slack, peteski. I think he was responding to the provocation)

If I understand this phenomenon, most people who do it don't think they are doing it, will deny they are doing it, even believe they are being helpful. David, I can't tell for sure, but I believe you are not doing it intentionally. And I don't think you are even aware you are doing it. So, I'll politely ask that you not respond on this or any other thread I start in the future.

To everybody else, I apologize for the unpleasantness. When I get back the tapered dowels next week and get a chance to engrave them, I will post the results in a new thread.

[Robert_56]

Maybe it's all in perspective of interpretation but trolling? You're kidding right? After re-re-reading your post, guess not. So much for folks trying to be helpful. As an outsider, all I will say is wow.