Located in Oberstaufen, Germany – a picturesque Bavarian resort mecca – the Allgäuer Hof hotel empahsizes health by providing numerous athletic and health-conscious activities – yoga, hiking, massage, skiing and a low-calorie diet are among its offerings. In a very competitive tourism market, an attractive, durable sign is essential for fiscal vitality.
Manfred Didier, proprietor of Timber Signs (Ofterschwang, Germany), and his fabricator, Marcus Goebels, handled the job. The hotel’s owner had seen 3-D signs on trips to the U.S. – they’re more common there than in Germany – and had asked a different, digital-printing-oriented shop to fabricate the sign. Instead, he referred the customer to Timber Signs.
They fashioned the post from laminated spruce, and a local blacksmith fabricated the scrolls at the base and apex of the sign from wrought iron, as well as the sign’s steel-frame encasement. To assist the scroll-making process, Timber Signs created sketches and exact-scale drawings for the blacksmith.
Timber Signs routed the 3 x 5-ft. signface, which comprises 18-lb. CoraFoam® HDU, on its Gerber Sabre 408 CNC router, and handpainted the letters with 1Shot lettering enamel; the remaining face was decorated with acrylic spraypaint. To create the faux-finish, they used a two-color, sponge technique and applied it by hand.
Most of the pieces were routed on the shop’s router; some finer details were chiseled by hand with Pfeil tools. Didier gilded the small, oval panel and stars with 23.75K goldleaf after an application of LeFranc Charbonnel slow size.
“Creating the whole 3-D border with all the leaves was a challenge,” Didier said. “Preparing the files
for routing [using Gerber’s ArtPath routing and engraving software] took several hours; a tremendous number of vectors and points had to be coordinated. Because I was working with such tiny loops, the software crashed several times. Routing with such precise details can be time-consuming as well.”
Goebels applied the panel to a plywood backing layer with West System two-part epoxy, and the Timber Signs team connected the layer with a Hilti drill and countersunk screws.