Industrial Templates: Transparent Acrylic
Industrial templates have a huge variety of purposes and applications, the transparent acrylic you see in this blog post is actually a template used for t-shirt printing.
There is masking on this acrylic though, just to prevent it from being scratched on our aluminium grid table of our Austrian CNC laser and some smoke that raises off the bed.
There are a variety of sizes that CNCROi.com made for this t-shirt template application and the hole you see in one of the corners allows easy hanging on the wall using a nail when this isn’t in use by the customer.
What we are doing for this industrial template is simply adding cross-hatches and then doing it again with a 45 degree offset.
In this case, it’s transparent acrylic (it looks green during production due to the protective masking) but it could have been a colored or solid color of your choice.
CNCROi.com can also make industrial templates in different thickness materials so whether you want something that less than a mm or a fraction of an inch or half an inch or 12 mm then we can make it.
When it comes to laser cutting acrylic, CNCROi.com is using highly focused energy to cut through oil, so yes, it’s very flammable but that’s why we watch this very closely during production and have a powerful extraction and compressed air to blow the flame out before it becomes dangerous.
The reason the lines are so prominent and fuzzy is because we are engraving into the acrylic, so all that stuff that we dig out settles around the line, the end result is less than a mm thick.
The nice flame polish edge you get from our industrial laser feels very nice on your finger without any jaggedness or spurs, just clean and smooth to the touch.
These look dirty just because I didn’t wash them, they are straight out of the machine and the darker marks you see in the image below is just some smoke that settled on the bottom of the masking, it comes off with the masking.
Having a machine that can open in the front and back allows us to efficiently process entire sheets of acrylic at CNCROi.com without having to cut it down to size.
Laser cut acrylic is also very durable and more flexible a material than alternatives such as glass, which can be very brittle and quite dangerous in a production environment as they can produce sharp shards if they fall on the ground as well as chip.
Another application that we use acrylic for is actually molds for things like clay pot to cement branding by pushing it into it before it dries.
Acrylic has a huge number of uses because it’s available in a variety of colors, opacities and thicknesses that suit many of our clients industrial template needs.
There was a total production run of 6 units for this project, all having the same engraving spec but at different sizes.
CNC laser engraving is incredibly precise, whether it’s lines, images or a combination of branding requirements.
When it comes to industrial templates, CNCROi.com can work with anything from sketches on a napkin to CAD documents, we can use them all for reference and prototyping.
Two more units complete, they are just as precise and laying them produces a singular line, meaning they are all straight and totally identical without any deviation from the customer’s design.
Holding acrylic with one hand isn’t easy when you are dealing with multiple sizes and acrylic is actually pretty slippery especially right out of the machine with the masking removed.
If you are looking for industrial templates, any size and shape, contact CNCROi.com right now!