Wooden trophies have an elegant charm in itself when crafted & polished well. The contribution of wood as a leading trophy making material in history is undeniably great. Olympia in Australia is going to introduce the world of wooden trophies at a glance.

When someone talks about sports trophies and school trophies, the business world hardly fascinates about achievements. However, when you talk about corporate trophies and awards, the business world is ready to give you ears.

Precious metals and stones are mighty materials in the trophy making industry. However, wood has a prolonged history since ancient eras when human beings learned to give trophies and awards during the pace of civilization.

Undoubtedly, metals are superior material to shine, and natural stones adorn natural beauty. Fortunately, woods have the best of both worlds, yet wooden trophies remained favourite of people belonging to all economic strata. 

Natural grains, veins, patterns, colours, and styles are parts of wooden beauty that none can resist to praise. 

Let’s have some value-adding knowledge about wooden trophies. 

 

Types of Woods in Trophy Making

Fundamentally, we know three different categories of woods used in the furniture and other wooden product making industry. 

  1. Softwood
  2. Hardwood
  3. Processed or engineered wood

In the wooden products industry, a wide range of wood varieties are in use. Some woods are expensive and exotic like walnut, cherry, etc. while some are locally available and far cheaper than you imagine, such as bamboo and acacia. 

Wooden trophies and awards are seldom made of unprocessed natural woods, and more often from processed woods.

 

In simple words,

  • Unprocessed woods used as such, and in original forms.
  • Processed woods are mostly engineered woods.

Processed woods are Plywood, Oriented Strand Board, High-Density Fiberboard (HDF), Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF), and Composite Board. In trophy or award making Medium Density Fibreboards (MDF) or say particle board considers the best material.

For the sake of your knowledge, the MDF used to be compressing wood chips. The middle layer contains larger wooden chips than outer layers. Wooden chips with glue used to compress and compacted to yield strong, durable, and dense wood material that is best befitting for trophy making processes like cutting, carving, crafting, and finishing.

MDF allows you to apply different fine finishes, including Walnut, American Cherry, Black Foil Finish, Alderwood, and several other glossy and non-glossy finishes simulating natural stone finishes.

Fortunately, Olympia in Sydney is using exotic & expensive woods from global sources. The types of precious woods used in trophy making are:

  • Mahogany | Bolivian Rosewood | Peruvian Walnut | Curly Makor
  • Gabon Ebony | Jatoba | Lancewood| Bloodwood
  • Padauk | Purpleheart | Tigerwood| Bubinga | Rosewood
  • Wenge | Zebrawood | Cherry | Teak | Fig

Olympia presents some decent samples representing different kinds of wood material used in trophies and awards making.



Wooden Trophy Parts

The Entire Body of the trophy/award 

Body of some trophies or awards is entirely made of wood while some have selected portions or parts.

sales plaque

Sales Plaque

large walnut plaque

Large Walnut Plaque, Black Brass Plate

Most of the wooden plaques are made of wood as a whole. 

Some wooden plaques have insignia or metal (brass/gold) plates attached to it.

 

Background of a Trophy or Award

premium timber and glass

Premium Timber & Glass

As its name suggests, the background provides visual and physical support/background to a trophy or award. Wood is an excellent material to meet the requirements of background material. 


It eases fixing of body parts of a trophy with the screw, nuts, or adhesive. It provides a visual background to transparent glasses as well as acrylic like translucent material to create visual contrasts.



The base of a Trophy or Award

glass chrome

Glass, Chrome & Wooden Base

Wood is a highly popular material to create a trophy or award base. It can give a lightweight but large mass to the trophy base and proved an ideal material to act as a stand to keep the entire body of a trophy stable and aesthetically pleasing.


Apart from physical support and gravity, the wooden base also provides the best space for the attachment of an engraving plate. Most of the woods have darker shades than bright metals. So, metal plates are considering the best candidate to fix on wooden bases.

 

Wooden Trophy Making Process

The process of wooden trophy making depends on the type of woods we use.

For Natural Woods:

  • It requires cutting of different trophy parts according to the design of each piece from the whole raw woods. Mostly, trophy bases are in rectangular, square, circular, oval, or custom shapes.
  • The edging of wooden parts used to carry out as per designed edge profiles.
  • The next step is surface finishing. The process of polishing of woods in the trophy making remains the same as the furniture making process.
  • The process of varnishing & printing or colouring also remains similar to furniture making. 
  • Recently, machine cutting & laser engraving techniques proved useful in minute carving and crafting the designs on the tiny parts of wooden trophies. It proves cost-effective due to automation.

For Manufactured Woods:

We know that different engineering woods require different methods of manufacturing, but compression for compaction remains the same as a principal technique in all kinds of processed woods. The recent advancements, thanks to computerized processing technologies, enable us to create natural-like grains, veins, fissures, ripples, and patterns in the engineering woods.

 

Wooden Trophy Finishes

Different types of wood finishing techniques used in the trophy or award making industry. However, we can classify wood finishes into glossy and non-glossy categories. 

Gloss Finish:

high gloss wood

Premium High Gloss Wood Gavel Plaque

executive wooden

Executive Wooden Gavel and Block

With glossy finishing, we can get highly reflective surfaces with smooth feels. Glossy finishes

 

Piano Finish:

piano_finish_wooden

Sales Small Piano Finish Wooden Pedestal

sales piano

Sales Large Piano Finish Wooden Peak, Standing Plaque

Due to the application of varnish and preservatives, it shines, but surfaces remain uneven based on the textures it carries. You can feel bumps and pits on the surfaces that make wooden trophies more natural and engrossing. 



Benefits of Wooden Trophies

When we use woods as the trophy making material, it comes with certain benefits to list, such as:

Natural Beauty in Wooden Trophies

  • Woods have natural grains, veins, fissures, cracks, patterns due to mineral deposition and arrangements of phloem & xylem in its structure.
  • Similarly, each wood type has typical colours and shades for different stages of growth & maturity.
  • These typical characteristics make each piece of wood completely unique, just like natural rocks/stones have it. Therefore, wooden trophies look eye-soothing and engage the onlookers.

Easy Availability of Woods

of course, exotic woods are rare, but all trophies are not made of exotic woods. Instead, trophy makers look at locally available but superior quality woods as their raw material. The native woods remain acceptable across the country and earn prestige in the global market too.

Woods are readily available in nearby forest areas or commercially available through suppliers. Trophies and plaques hardly consume a big volume of woods, and local availability makes it a favourite material in the industry particularly, for cheaper wood alternatives like bamboo and similar wood types.

Wooden Trophies with Maintainability

Natural woods demand some precautionary treatments to preserve for a long duration, but the annual plan of maintenance like waxing, varnishing, or coating solutions are easing the job a lot.

Fortunately, engineered wood hardly needs any expensive treatment once it gets finished. Simple polishing or waxing can work best to keep its lustrous appearance intact.

Wooden Trophies – A Cost-Effective Material 

Woods are abundant in nature and can proliferate in the vicinity of trophy manufacturing areas. Woods suppliers are everywhere thanks to the high demand for lumber in the furniture-making industry. Carpenters are affordable and modern automation through machines again make wooden trophies cheaper.

Wooden Trophies – A Green Material

Woods is a natural material with naturally decaying capability. Thus, wooden trophies are environmentally-friendly and never harm nature anyway. Woods can grow commercially in fields without destroying precious forests and their fauna & flora. 

Wooden Trophies – A Sustainable Material

We can turn wood retrieved from an old ship or wooden scraps from ancient buildings made chiefly of wood. Salvaged timbers can turn, carve, print, and engrave as per needs in the trophy or award making process. Fortunately, Olympia is famous for its use of sustainable woods as a raw material in trophy making.

Wooden Trophies – A Sturdy & Durable Material 

Hardwood category of woods has many varieties, which are hard enough to provide strong wooden trophies to last for longer and bear various hits easily. The majority of engineered wood is strong and durable in physical and chemical properties due to pressure, additives, and type of glues used in the manufacturing process.

 

Looking for Custom Wooden Trophies & Awards?

At present, the trophy & award making industry in Australia is witnessing an upsurge in demand for wooden trophies due to public awareness about hazards coming from the use of synthetic materials in the trophy making process. 

Thereby, Olympia has taken precautionary steps by increasing the production of wooden trophies in a range of designs, materials, and varieties of applications. Let’s explore a big inventory of wooden trophies or give a custom order to make your event more memorable using wooden awards.