We call it Maple on Birch. But the name really doesn't matter, it's just a cool product and we thought it was worth it's own blog post. We had an oak serving board like this sitting in inventory, then we sold it as a wedding present. We had some extra birch board left from another project and decided to use it to build one of our medium sized serving boards. Then we decided to adorn it with a Canada flag. We found a unique image that was free to use (we donated a couple bucks to the artist) and decided that was exactly the image we wanted. Normally, we print in black and white mode which is perfect for logos and adding some text to things such as custom coasters. But this image was too good to pass up the opportunity to take full advantage of the texture so we choose to print in greyscale mode. Birch is a lighter coloured wood so lends itself well to a finer print mode. Laser printing in greyscale slows down the printer significantly, 4 or 5 times slower. Actual print time for this on our laser was just over 5 hours, but worth every minute.

Now we could go on and on about the national pride of printing a flag, but that was not the motivation here. We could just as easily chosen to print the Saskatchewan provincial outline, a print job that likely would take 5 minutes (Saskatchewan = easy to draw, hard to pronounce). We liked the shapes and textures of leaves that make up both the primary leaf in the Center of the flag as well as the side bars. Just a great image. The dimensions of the serving board lend itself extremely well to the print of a flag, a national flag, a provincial flag, any flag.

We snagged a bit of video about two-fifths of the way through the laser print operation and again with about one hour left to go. We think it falls nicely into the category of "that's neat to see". Others may think, hmmm, why bother, but we bothered anyway.
Laser Printing during the 2nd Hour
Laser Printing during the 5th Hour
The finished item is now for sale in our store.