Large Carved Wall Plaques for Government, Court, Military, & Corporate Buildings
Fig 1 - Examples of Some of the Wall Plaques We Have Made
Welcome to our gallery for large custom dimensional wall plaques, defined here as sizes from 3 ft to 20 ft. The most popular large round plaques have sizes 5 ft to 10 ft in diameter or maximum width or height. Large plaques are usually mounted high up on the interior or exterior walls of buildings. They can be used for building identification, organizational branding, or decoration. Because of their size and elegance, they are often the the centerpiece of a building. They are usually mounted high above an outside entrance to a building ,or in a large and high entrance lobby, high on a wall in an auditorium, or above a judge in a courtroom. We make these for courts, government executive or agency headquarter buildings, military facilities, corporate headquarters, large churches, universities, and civic centers. Fig 1 shows a few of these large plaques.
We make a wide variety of wall plaque styles with different materials, carving techniques, surface coatings, and design features. The carved 3-D bas-relief, 2.5-D multi-level flat relief, and engraved plaques we manufacture have substrates made of either High-Density-Urethane (HDU), beautiful hardwoods such as African Mahogany, Cherry, Walnut, Maple and Oak, and aluminum. We employ several types of surface treatments including artist painting , staining (wood only), bronze, brass , copper and aluminum plating, metal polishing and burnishing, gold & silver-leaf gilding, and cut-out aluminum cladding for raised flat art and letters. We usually apply two clear coats to protect the surface finish from UV, rain & snow, and salt air. We use only the finest materials and craftsmanship to make our large beautiful plaques, so you can be proud of them while they continue to look like new for a lifetime.
You are always welcome to call Christie or Regina at 951-698-8484 or you can email us at info@artsignworks.com to get more information, to describe a plaque you want made, or to get prices.
Fig. 2 - Shown above are a few of the Size, Shape , Carving Relief and Surface Treatment Styles we use to create our Large Wall Plaques
PLAQUE STYLES AND THEIR PRICES
The price of a plaque is based on its style and its size (price roughly proportional to its area, which is determined by its diameter, if round, or height x width for rectangular plaques). Large plaques have higher prices than small plaques and wood plaques are more expensive than High-Density-Urethane (HDU) plaques, because wood material costs about twice as much as HDU, and takes more labor to carve and sand. Metal-plated HDU plaques have higher prices than painted HDU plaques because of the high cost of the metal plating (especially 24K gold leaf) and the labor to polish and burnish the metal to a high shine. 3-D bas-relief (i.e., rounded surface profiles, like Greek friezes) plaques have higher prices than 2.5-D multi-level flat relief or engraved plaques, because they take 3 to 5 times as long to carve on our CNC routers, and it takes 2 to 3 times as long for the artist to intricately paint with many colors with a small artist brush. Our least expensive dimensional plaques are 2.5-D multilevel relief or engraved HDU . Fig. 2 above shows examples of some of these different styles of plaques. See Fig 1 on our PRICE page for approximate prices of our large plaques with various styles.
Fig 3- Shown above are the fabrication stages used to fabricate and ship a 8 ft Emiri Air Force plaque to Qatar on the Persian Gulf
FABRICATION & SHIPPING
We make large wall plaques, from 3 ft to 16 ft in diameter. We make elliptical or rectangular plaques up to 20 ft wide. The widest HDU sheets available are 5 ft wide, and our CNC router tables only have the capability of handling HDU sheets of 5 ft or less. Therefore plaques greater than 5 ft diameter require two pieces of HDU to be carved and bonded together. Figure 3 above shows the steps in this process. These plaques have internal steel rectangular hollow tubes (typically 1" or 1.5" wide) embedded in the 3" or 4" thick HDU to hold the pieces together so that no seam shows. Threaded studs which will be inserted in holes drilled in the wall are often welded to this frame so that these plaques, which weigh several hundred to several thousand pounds, can be properly supported. Although most of signs are made from High Density Urethane (HDU), it is not light, weighing 20 lb/ft3, slightly lighter than Cedar wood. An alternative to studs inserted in the wall are Z-clips (linear horozintal hangers) which work well with smaller plaques (6 ft or less) and have less invasive drilling on the wall .
Because these are shipped across the country in a large box or flat bed truck, single piece round wall plaques are limited to about 10 ft in diameter and rectangular plaques to about 10 ft in height up to 20 ft wide. The picture above shows how plaques greater than 7 ft in diameter have to be crated and supported by a wood framework of 2x4's and 4x4 s to enable the plaque to be shipped in a box truck which has a maximum width and height of about 7.5 ft. Wall plaques larger than this must be shipped in 2 pieces and assembled on site, usually directly on the wall.
CONTENTS OF THIS GALLERY
This Gallery is organized in three sections. The top section shows the largest plaques we have made from 8 to 16 ft. The middle section shows plaque with sizes fro 5 ft to 8 ft. The bottom section shows plaques with sizes from 3 ft to 5 ft. These smaller plaques can be made from a single 5 ft wide sheet of HDU and do not require an internal steel frame. The can be shipped in a wood crate and do not require the large angle wood frame shown in the bottom right photo in Fig 3, because when packaged in their crate they can lie flat in the bed of a standard box truck.
