First time trying to stack sheet material to make a sign, vs channel letter material.
Somehow it evens out, PVC costs more than channel letter material, but it’s way faster and easier to assemble. Don’t need to use the hand pliers to make bends in the aluminum/plastic flashing. I can buy pvc much easier than channel letter material here, and it cuts like a dream. It also is easier to mount and seal, and paint. So I save much more in time than flat cost, but time is also money.
Also cutting pvc is ridiculously easy. I never hear the router bog down. I used a single o-flute cutter here, 1/8" and cutting in .25" passes at 30mm/s at 1 on the dewalt 611 on the mpcnc, and I can still push it faster.
Can you speak a bit more to your process? Are you stacking up PVC sheets and then cutting the letters into them, creating the channel? Black material as the base, then the translucent white, then the white cover, then another black layer? LED strips on the inside?
Looks great and obviously I’m asking as I have a couple of ideas here…
So I first take the text, and I offset it outwards by .5". After that, I usually take the outer most vector of the offset, and then offset it inwards to get the pieces that I stack. This gives you lots of room to put the LED’s, since it’s basically the outline, instead of all the small pieces like the inside of the “B”.
For the acrylic, I just cut the outer most offset only. I then attach it to the top of the stack of material I cut in the last step, I use liquid nails pl8 and use some spax screws after countersinking. They’re small enough to be covered by the top layer of PVC
Then I cut 6mm PVC for the top layer, which is just the text with the offset.
