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Updated Product: Birth Stats Wall Hanging

A stunning way to celebrate the arrival of a new member of the family! These birth stats plaques capture all those critical details in a beautiful, giftable way.

Made from your choice of West Australian native Jarrah, or European Birch.

Updated: New materials

We used to make these in bamboo originally, for a beautiful, eco look. We're switching away from bamboo for various internal reasons, and we had actually discontinued this product! But several customers asked us to bring it back, as it was a popular and well received gift.

So we did! We revised it to use Jarrah and our relatively new European birch, and brought it back.

How it's made

This product looks very simple on the outside; but as with all items - there is a process to make them to get them just perfect for you!

The first step is the artwork. The trick with the artwork is that all words and letters need to connect to something - the final result has to be a single piece. The piece can have holes in it, but all the letters need to connect. The cut out additive style of this specific item makes this fairly straightforward with minimal letter modifications. (The reverse - the subtractive style - means inner parts of letters like "o" get removed unless they've got connectors).

We design them visually; that is, with everything laid out on top of each other so it looks correct. But this isn't cuttable - the it would cut past the edges! So we ask the computer to union all of the shapes together to make a single path. The image below shows the two variants.

The visual design on the left, and the unioned (cuttable) design on the right.
The visual design on the left, and the unioned (cuttable) design on the right.

Then it goes onto the laser! This one requires cutting on the honeycomb table. To explain this one requires some backstory!

Ideally, when laser cutting, there should be nothing underneath the material when the laser cuts through. This allows the laser to pass by, and smoke and the ejected materials to be vented. But you can't unfortunately suspend the material in midair - maybe in the future once we have anti-gravity - so we need to have something underneath to hold the material in place.

Our preferred option is a blade table. This is made up of aluminium "blades" that sit under the material, going front to back, about 50mm apart. The blades have a small contact point at the top that sits just under the material. This generally gives the best result for most cutting; there is only small reflections back onto the material where the blades are.

But the blades have a downside... if you cut small parts that are a little bit wider than the blade, that small part as the potential to "flip up" - that is, half fall through and half sit up as it's caught on a blade in the middle. Then, when the laser head passes over or near that part (as it's only 8-10mm above the surface of the material), the head can grab and drag the material around the bed, destroying your work! This is the most common cause of a cut failure with all of our work.

This particular product is one of those ones with small, slightly longer than 50mm components that are horizontal (against the "grain" of the blade table) - the perfect storm for the blade table, if you'd like! Every attempt to cut these on a blade table has failed.

So we need to break out the honeycomb table. This is an addition that we place on top of the blade table. It's made of aluminum fashioned into a honeycomb pattern, with the thin edges facing upwards, and the holes being around 5-10mm wide. So any parts smaller than this won't flip up and catch the laser.

But there is a flip side, of course! Because there are so many more contact points for the laser, there are suddenly so many more reflections from the table back onto the material. We try and avoid using the honeycomb table where we can due to the damage it does to the back of the material. In this case, it leaves extra burn marks on the back of the wood.

For this specific item, we heavily sand the back of the plaque to remove most of them after cutting. But it's not possible to remove all of these. For this product, the trade-off is that the back isn't the visible part of the product. It bothers me at times that it's not perfect, but in all things in life there is a trade-off to get the right results, and this is the trade-off for this one!

Ordering yours

You can view all the details, and order yours below!

Kind words from one of our customers

"Great quality! A preview of product was sent before it was made to make sure I was happy and it was perfect!"