PROJECT News
What turned out to be probably the most challenging job that Scotts Signs and Posters has ever completed started with a seemingly innocent question. Alistair Scott, one of the three partners of Scotts Signs
and Posters, explains: “We received a phone call from an Andy Bardell of Eleventh Hour Design who asked, ‘Can you engrave into oak?’. We have a 3m x 2m CNC router so our answer was an immediate 'Yes’. But as the conversation continued, we began to discover what we would be letting ourselves in for. We knew it would be a big undertaking but we like a challenge and are known for sorting out tricky jobs for our customers; so we agreed to engrave 18 half ton pieces of oak, 600mm wide and 6m long, that were to go into a woodland area for Rushmoor Borough Council.” Converting Andy’s designs from Photoshop files into files
that could be could routed from was the easy bit. Alistair soon realised that they would have to firstly partially dismantle the router, removing the vacuum bed. The second job was to obtain the landlord’s permission to use the main, bigger part of the building and take down a partition wall, to enable the wood to be manoeuvred straight into the router room. “At this stage, we were anticipating carrying the half
tonne pieces in ourselves,” says Alistair. ”When the wood arrived on a thumping great lorry, each piece was significantly larger than we had thought. There were 18 ‘trees’ of 1.5 tonnes each and the biggest was 6m by 1.2m! Another problem now presented itself, how to get each massive tree into the building and onto the router; there was no way we could lift one and a half tonnes between all of us.” Scotts Signs and Posters enlisted the help of a local friendly
farmer and his vehicles to lift the timbers one by one into the main section of the building. To move them from the building entrance
Adventures in oak at Scotts Signs and Posters
Just getting the huge timbers, each weighing around 1.5 tonnes, in to Scotts’ factory was a challenge in itself.
to the router the team adapted some industrial racking, by adding wheels and installed an engine winch from the steel roof joists. Once the timber was placed on the racking, it was then secured to the winch. “Next, one of us ‘surfed’ on the top to create enough of a
swinging motion so that the oak could be ‘skidded’ onto the router in exactly the right place. The actual engraving time was minimal in comparison to the preparations. As each piece of timber had a few designs to be engraved, we had to stop the router every so often to move the ‘tree’ along the machine or to turn it round, which took at least an hour every time,” says Alistair. “There was absolutely no room for error; we had 18 pieces to carve and no spares. “The normal working clearance of our router is 145mm but by removing the vacuum bed this was increased to 170mm. Due to the natural undulations of the timbers, their surface varied between 150mm to 160mm. The engraving needed to be 10mm into the surface so, with the working clearance of the router at 170mm, there was very little or at times no tolerance. “Planning and manoeuvring were the most
time-consuming elements of this job and, in all our 41 years of trading, this was probably our most challenging job to date,” says business founder Malcolm Scott. The engraved timbers have now been sunk
1.5m into the ground at various points on Southwood Woodland in Farnborough, Hampshire. Each vertical length indicates areas of the woodland where there are either plants or animals of particular interest. Brian Stephens from Rushmoor Borough
An engine winch was used to move the tree sections into the correct position for engraving.
46 Sign Update ISSUE 125 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010
Council explains: “The Oak timbers are being used to support interpretation panels to explain the different habitats and wild life throughout the Southwood Woodland. The timbers are located at strategic points, each engraved to a very high quality depicting deer, butterflies, bats, reptiles, leaves, etc. The concept and art work was the inspiration of Andy Bardell, Eleventh Hour Design and the engraving by Ali and
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