Color fill granite

[Jeff Chumbley]

I have a customer that has granite tiles that he wants 6" numbers on. They are for houses. Since these are to be outside what is the best way to color fill the numbers. There are different colors of granite so we are mainly looking at gold and black fills.


Jeff

[Rodne Gold]

Rub N buff metallic pastes , gilders pastes or acrylic paints work well , HOWEVER , granite (and most stone) is porous and you can often get paint or metallic wax stains on it that cannot be removed as the fill sinks into the unengraved sections.
You have a few options
1) Coat the granite with a sealer prior to lasering/blasting
2) Laser thru a suitable resist (like polyester based sign vinyl) and then fill.

The "marking" on granite is generally quite shallow unless you blast , and thus its quite difficult to fill large areas with solid colours if you dont use a mask and need to do a solvent based cleanup of overfilled areas as the cleanup process tends to scoop fill from those large areas.
There might be another option (Ive never tried it) for gold and that is to use gold leaf , engrave thru a mask , apply size (I think thats the glue that sort of allows gold leaf to stick's name) , remove the mask and apply the leaf. I have no clue at all about gold leaf or gilding so might be talking out my hat on this one!!