Making an Engraved Memorial Paver at PAVERART, through the eyes of a 12 year old!

Small businesses provide a great opportunity to show younger family members what the "real world" is all about.

CORRECTION:

ALL businesses have a great opportunity to bring the real world to kids. Why not?

Early on in the summer I brought my son Dominic to PAVERART for a couple reasons.

1) As any parent can relate to, there is nothing worse than down time creating boredom, not just for the kid, but their parents!

2) We had as a family a loss that many people can related too: The loss of our beloved cat of 19 years! Dominic took this especially hard.

At PAVERART, we have a segment of our business that supports fundraising.

Brick fundraising campaigns are pretty common, but the technology we use (engraving through sand-blasting) can apply to memorials, signs, stepping stones, anything where stone engraving can be used.

So making a pet memorial for CRYSTAL became the project of the day!

While Dominic would have some help from the PAVERART team, he really want to be hands-on making the memorial Paver.

Here's a few videos that show key pieces of what it takes to make an engraved Paver.

The PAVERART Team, Working on an Engraved Pet Memorial

Step 1: Find yourself a PAVER, than give it a good old cleaning!

Dominic had plenty of encouragement here from dad, Jimmy and Chris!

Step 2: Get your image onto the computer, "draw it" in a way that the software can translate it to a printable file.

The stencil printer than "cuts" a rubber stencil that essentially serves as a "shield" for sand-blasting out particles from the Concrete Paver.

Step 3: Once the stencil has been printed, it needs to be glued onto the Paver. After the stencil is applied, the partially cut letters need to be "weeded" from the Paver.

Here's an old video of Dominic weeding a stencil.

Step 4: High power sand-blasting. This is the process for "engraving" the PAVER.

For concrete Pavers, sand-blasting is the only option. Many people laser engrave their Pavers, but that technology only works with CLAY bricks, not concrete.

Step 5: Paint or "fill" the engraved letters with enamel or some form of fill (epoxy, cement, etc).

Here, Dominic brings in his memorial to Crystal, more banter from Chris, Mark and Mike!

Note: In actual practice, we have over 20 manufacturing steps to make an engraved PAVER.......but these are the main ones.

Crystal's Engraved Memorial by Dominic (at PAVERART)

And finally, Dominic's memorial at our home.

As Dom says, "It's not perfect, but I'm proud of it."

This qualifies as a great day of summer vacation!