Hi!

This is small article to illustrate how to carve a 3D wood inscription using a hand router.  The full process is quite quick (depending on the lengths of the texts), doesn’t requires any fancy tool or template, all you need is a hand router, a piece of paper, an indigo paper and a piece of wood.

In this project I’ll create a name inscription for the dog house. The name of the dog is “Tesa” (I’m lucky, it has just 4 letters)

Let’s get to work

Step 1:  open a word document on your laptop, pick a nice font and then print out the layout. The font has to be “fat” enough to fit a straight router bit.

Step 2: draw the text to the wood using the indigo paper

Step 3: pick a straight router bit and start routing. You have to follow the edge of each letter from inside out.

Step 4:  stain the wood, especially the carved letter part. Do not bother if you touch the rest of the surface, it will be sand anyway.

Step 5: once the stain dried, do a bit of sanding (e.g. using belt sander) until you remove completely the stained surface .

Step 6: clean surface to remove all the sanding dust and apply two coats of finishing paint.

This is all the magic, six simple steps to do a 3d wood inscription with a hand router.