WWA Info Exchange

You can buy commercially made lettering templates for routing signs, but I've found them difficult to use. Even worse, I find it easy to misspell the words when you're working one letter every minute or so. I recently discovered that one of the local steel suppliers offers CNC plasma cutting. I had a stencil made (see below) for $35 (I supplied the steel). Very clean cut, and much easier to use than the template set if you have a design you will be cutting repeatedly.



See "sign template"

Isn't it a strange thing to have to tell people that the ground they're on is not theirs? Imagine you'll get good use out of that, but can't those laser burners fry letters into wood as well?

In a small defense of the morons who feel they must trespass on my land, I own an inholding in the Santa Fe National Forest with an easement for a Forest Service road running through it. For those not familiar with the term, that means my land is bounded on every side by national forest. Someone driving up the road might reasonably assume he/she is still in national forest (except of course for the "Posted" signs at the cattleguards at the boundaries). At one time the Forest Service posted signs lettered like this template to show the boundaries between private and public land. For some reason,\ people have a habit of chopping these down, I suppose on the theory that if they take the sign down, the land is no longer private.

While you could probably laser-burn the signs, it would be expensive and the lettering would not be as deep as a routed sign that mimics "authentic" Forest Service signs. With the template I can route a sign in 10 minutes or so, and a $35 template is a whole lot cheaper than a CNC router.