Logo Transfer To Roasted Maple with Water Based Finish

[SonOfMI]

Has anyone tried this on roasted maple? And has anyone used General Finishes High Performance water based Top Coat to do this instead of PolyCrylic?

This guy shows how he printed a mirror image of his logo on plain paper using a laser printer then used polycrylic to transfer it into a piece of wood. Unless I missed it he didn’t say what kind of wood. He did say it worked with water based finishes, but didn’t elaborate. I keep GF HP Top Coat in my finishing room, but don’t have Polycrylic. I could try testing with the HP Top Coat, but I don’t have any roasted maple scraps. I have a bunch of hard and soft maple cutoffs in my cutoff bins and as weird as closed grain woods can be with accepting tricks like this, roasted maple can be more so. 

Here’s what I saw that made me wonder about this:

https://youtu.be/xHOWUR8vTvo

[henrim]

I don’t know those products but laser transfers can be done with acetone. I have done them mostly on copper and aluminum. On birch plywood too. Should work on pretty much on any material. But it is a bit of a hit and miss process. Different printers yield different results. I suggest you to experiment some before making a headstock logo. 

[Bizman62]

Hi and welcome!

After having looked the video it's obvious that a laser print works better than an inkjet print. The laser "ink" is plastic powder which is melted on the paper whilst inkjet ink is water based and will smudge with moisture.

The reason why acetone and the two clearcoats work is that they all contain solvents that melt plastic - just think about the end result of applying a clearcoat: It's a plastic film! And it's not because of a chemical reaction between two components, some stuff just evaporates and the liquid plastic becomes solid. So if you apply a suitable solvent you can temporarily make the plastic liquid again. As shown melting the plastic with heat works but similarly to the laser engraving the end result depends much on the wood species and its homogeneity.

I guess any poly will do. The ingredients of Polycrylic are as follows, supposedly the most harmful ones are those that melt plastic:

Chemical	CAS No./ID
Water	007732-18-5
Propylene glycol butyl ether	005131-66-8
Ethylene glycol	000107-21-1
N-Methylpyrrolidone	000872-50-4
Ethoxylated-2,4,7,9-tetramethyl-5-decyne-4,7-diol	009014-85-1
Fumed silica, crystalline-free	112945-52-5
Dipropylene glycol monobutyl ether	029911-28-2

[henrim]

What I forgot to mention is that you don’t necessarily need solvent for the laser transfer. Heat source like clothes iron is what I used to use for PCB transfers when I used laser transfer method. Obviously with wood, especially if it has glue seams, you want to be extra careful not to apply excess heat. And you may want experiment with different print materials. Fine magazine cover style paper works in my experience better than plain paper for heat transfer.

One other thing is that print density adjustment can make a huge difference, if your machine allows it.

Anyways I think you can likely get much better result with a water decal than laser transfer. 

[SonOfMI]

Thanks for the welcome and info. I figured I'd give an update since you guys were nice enough to help. I did some testing on a few scraps of hard maple and wasn't impressed with the results of using the General Finishes HP TopCoat to transfer a mirror image. I tried different amounts of pressure and different amounts of the poly but there would always be some spots where the laser toner rubbed off of the wood as I removed the paper after it dried. I tried letting it sit anywhere from an hour to a full day and no improvement, so I tried using Acetone. That transferred less of the image onto the wood. 

I make custom furniture and cabinetry in my one man shop. This guitar building thing is just a hobby for me that I get into when I have a bit of free time between or even in the middle of commissioned projects. Nothing for a week? Start a guitar build.  Finishing room is full of stuff drying? Sand a body. Anyway, normally I brand my work with a branding iron.  Heat it up, press it to the piece, lightly sand over it to clean it up then off to the finishing room it goes.  I have one iron with one of my logos that is 2"x2" and another one iron with my other smaller logo on it that I use for smaller pieces which is 3/4" tall by 2.5" wide. Looks good on the back of cabinets, edges of cutting boards, and undersides of desks. I only make a couple guitars a year and usually they're for me. I haven't branded or put a logo on any of the guitars I've built so far   I thought about using my small logo branding iron to brand the headstock on the guitar I'm working on right now, but I don't want my guitars to say "MY LAST NAME CUSTOM WOODWORKS".  It would somewhat fit, but not the full idea I'm going for.  So I pulled up photoshop, copied my smaller logo then altered the text to say "MY LAST NAME CUSTOM GUITARS".  I sized it to fit nicely on a headstock.  That's what I was printing mirror images of to try the poly and acetone stuff.  Since that didn't turn out as nice as I wanted, I ordered some waterslide decal paper and will try that on some scrap maple once it comes in.  

[Bizman62]

Thanks for the update.

It's sad that the laser printer trick didn't work for you, then again buying a few water decals doesn't bankrupt you. 

Do you think the HP TopCoat didn't work because it's water based? And further, do you think acetone failed because it evaporates too quickly to fully soften the "ink"? I mean, would a solvent based topcoat have given more open time for the plastic powder to transfer from the paper to the wood?