Custom Award: F16 Prototype
If you need a custom award, whether for sporting, novelty or corporate, CNCROi.com is your first and only choice!
Unlike any other award or “trophy” shop that I know, CNCROi.com is the only one that can make something amazing based on a sketch and make every component to your spec in just about any volume across a range of budgets. Why is that? Because that’s how we do all our stuff, to our customer’s specs, not ours.
Today, I decided to showcase some of our capabilities using as few materials as possible using a random object. In this case, we are using 3/4 inch solid pine (18 mm) and 1/4 inch (6 mm) frosted acrylic. Both of these materials I had in the shop already so there was nothing special about either the material or what I made out of them.
The goal with this custom award of a F16 was to show something like it was floating above the award from a distance, hence going with the frosted acrylic but I also wanted something with instant visual recognition so the thought of a F16 custom award came to mind.
I skipped showcasing the design aspect of this custom award design just because I wanted to focus on the production capabilities here at CNCROi.com. I’ve done lots of blog posts showing our 3D modeling and CAD capabilities before so this blog will focus on the REAL WORLD rather than the virtual one.
Just to recap, this design is “nothing special” nor are the materials or their combination, which makes making a custom award even more difficult because CNCROi.com is trying to convert something “not special” into something that’s worth giving and receiving!
The capabilities at CNCROi.com are incredible as a result, for our corporate clients, we go all-out using incredible materials like solid oak, mahogany and custom veneers with Corian, stainless steel and the list goes on. These custom corporate awards are a sight to be seen but as we respect our client’s and wholesalers to keep us behind the curtain, we’ll be going through a series of our custom award capabilities without infringing on these NDAs.
Now that the custom designed F16 frosted acrylic section of this custom award is finished being cut, you’ll notice we have four holes built into the design. These holes are vital because they provide a means of fastening the entire award together accurately, increase the strength overall of the ward AND accomplish this without having to resort to any adhesive what-so-ever.
Yes, that’s right, this custom award is made to be flat packed and screwed together using a pillar and post system that makes the award look fantastic and keep it together. That’s the hallmark of a wonderful utilitarian design!
Now, onto the pine, this is actually a piece of scrap from our custom pine box project which itself was a scrap from another project. Watch the video below to see what this was used for but it showcases the incredible flexibility in design and capabilities CNCROi.com brings to your organization.
Just like the custom CNC laser cut acrylic we just cut above, the pine will go through the same process by CNCROi.com‘s industrial wide-format Austrian CNC laser.
The pine is an important element in this custom award design of a F16, the reason is two-fold. The first, it adds added depth and “weight” to the award, giving it more presence and secondly, it adds much-needed contrast to the clear frosted acrylic. There are a lot of critical elements that go into designing a custom award, anybody can make one but not everybody can make one worth winning!
To keep things simple, the base of the custom award was made using the same pine as the F16 silhouette. We could have EASILY added several levels to the base as we’ve done in the past to create additional height and interest but the focus of this award was the airplane, not the base.
Depending on the client and the spec of the project, we can engrave the person’s name on either the base or the award, for some clients, the F16 would be replaced with the logo with the employee name on the base or vice versa. That’s the power of CNCROi.com, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is custom.
Now that the engraving of the award is done, it’s time to add additional contrasting elements, adding more “burned-in” outlines to the silhouette and wording darkens them substantially. An alternative to this would be to add custom inlays or paint filling, but this is the “easiest” way to achieve a similar result.
There is a lot of thinking and experience that goes into all the custom work CNCROi.com does, thankfully, you don’t need to have that, we can work from an abstract sketch and produce something awesome for you faster in our shop than it takes most “trophy shops” to send their order to China or India.
The reason being is we have absolute bleeding-edge technology in our custom CNC shop. From highly specialized 3D modeling software that Hollywood uses to make their big budget movies to top brand Austrian and American tools and equipment. When we go on a shopping trip, we don’t cut corners as we don’t do that for our customers either.
The masking on both sides of this custom award’s materials, pine and acrylic, is masked to protect it during cutting and engraving. Our Austrian CNC laser produces lots of heat which melts acrylic and releases resins and smoke from pine, neither of which you want landing and sticking on the surface.
Now that the F16 element of this custom award is cut out of pine, again, you see the four holes that will be used during production to hold it all together. To us, everything that leaves the shop has to be made at top quality for our customers, happy isn’t good enough a response for CNCROi.com, we want customers to be blown away when they get their custom work!
As this is the FIRST time this proof of concept or prototype custom award was made in the real world, there are a few extremely minor issues that would be resolved on the second go based on how production of this came about but overall, the results are really looking great!
CNCROi.com is a lean, clean and efficient shop, as a result, before anything goes into the recycling or fire pit, it’s used for as many applications as possible, so the outline of the F16 in pine left just enough room for the base to be cut out from their related scraps.
The goal at CNCROi.com is to make things custom for our customers but that also opened-up the floodgates across matching accessories, so if you wanted to give our awards with matching cutting boards, coasters, stencils and even key chains, we can do all that in-house!
Just like the F16 custom award top segment, the base is just as flexible and can be anything you want across shape, material and size. That’s what a true custom award is, CUSTOM. That’s why we aren’t in the trophy business but award one!
Trophies are trinkets that are thrown in the trash with little value as they are mass-produced junk, for us, that isn’t just a waste but it does little to inspire who you give this trophy to. A trophy isn’t something worth winning, an award is!
As this design is made to be flat packed, there are only two elements required to put it together, the base and a 90 degree angle F16. This makes assembly easy even for a child and takes nothing away from the design. When bringing this custom award back home, the award is just as easily disassembled and reassembled to make sure it doesn’t break during transport.
After production, the pine is looking a little rough due to the resins that have settled and stained the surface, luckily, we have a custom downdraft table (designed and made by CNCROi.com – watch video below) to make quick work of it!
This allows us to transform the image below…
Into something nice and clean blow in record time efficiently!
Using our aluminium pillar and post Chicago screws, putting the award together is a piece of cake! This design was built to require no adhesives using only three pieces of material and this is how it’s done!
The acrylic is plenty strong to support the weight of the F16 above and the contrast of the laser cut pine edges, clear glass-like edges of the acrylic just make everything flow nicely together.
The other side though, is looking a little rough, this is why this is a prototype and not a production model, to find the good and bad areas that need fixing. The next version would have a more symmetrical design and we’d use the laser to vaporize about half way through the pine instead of having to resort to widening the holes using our hand drill.
This would give the edges a very clear finish where the holes are that would allow a perfect wooden inlay to hide the screw heads. As our systems here run off databases, all you’d need to do is send us an excel file of the people, events and places you want engraved into the custom award and they would be added realtime during production.
In this case, custom cut veneer matching the hole size were put inside, using only friction at this point and time, to hide the pillar and post Chicago screws from the backside. A ledge is needed as the pine needs to be held tight against the acrylic on the other side, hence requiring some sort of inlay to cover them.
The design is looking very nice though, despite a few design issues, generally the back of an award isn’t noticed by anybody but to us, the front is just as important as the back when it comes to custom awards. We want this to look great at all angles!
The front though looks fantastic, a slightly more symmetrical design would make it pop even more. Those are all very easy fixes to do, as everything, design through production of this custom award was done in-house.
Are you looking for a custom CNC shop to make 100% CUSTOM awards for your next event, business conference, birthday, wedding, sporting event or gifting to sales people or customers? Contact CNCROi.com right now!
