Custom Business Awards: CNC Synergy!

Custom business awards that use many different processes and technologies are quite hard to find, luckily, CNCROi.com has the capability to fabricate truly unique and stunning awards that are worth winning.

If you want to get an idea of how the award came into being and the though process behind it, check out the video below.

Walid, the designer of this award, is also the person who 3D printed the part that held the stainless steel blades that then fit within the routed Maple base, hats off to him for making all of this possible on behalf of Building Transformations.

The advantage we offer our customers is total flexibility, as we start with raw materials, so you aren’t stuck designing something that must fit within a particular design style or specification… anything goes with CNCROi.com!

The custom business award required a CNC router, CNC 3D printer and two types of CNC fiber lasers, one to cut and one to etch then a CNC CO2 laser for the wood engraving so let’s start with the wood, in this case, Maple.

Maple is a wonderful hardwood that produces a rich dark brown engraving when lasered and has a nice weight to it as well, which is important to give the custom business award some weight and gravitas.

The Maple we use is from the mill, it has been rough sawed but most importantly, kiln dried, so bugs and dimensional warping is at a minimum, all things that are very important for a custom business award.

After the Maple has been sliced and diced, it’s time to get it ready for glue lamination but first, CNCROi.com has to flatten both sides in order to have a dead-on perfect seamless seam, we don’t want any voids or pockets in the wood because this will come out during the CNC routing and lasering down the line.

It might look easy seeing the video of me laminating this fir but it took me almost a year of trial and error to get the process refined to the point where I produce AMAZING lamination where, if it wasn’t for the differences in wood grain, you wouldn’t see a seam at all.

After we have a perfect edge on two sides of the kiln dried Maple, it’s time to glue it up so that we have a solid slab to work from thereon, this is the foundation of the custom business awards we are making, so we need it to be perfect, strong and resilient to the pressures CNCROi.com will be putting it through during the fabrication process.

I tend to error on using too much rather than not enough glue with these hardwood lamination, regardless of what we are going to make with it, the last thing I want to do is to possibly have some voids or unglued parts which will break apart or fall apart once a router bit is going through it at 18 000 RPMs.

These custom business awards had two “versions”, one was the darker Maple and the other, and more abundant, was the lighter Maple, hence having them as two separate glue-ups, though I could have just made it out of one solid slab, I find things easier to just split up router work to make sure I didn’t do one of the wrong ones by accident as their specs are different.

After using our CNC router to flatten both sides of the darker Maple, it’s time to start forming it into beautifully unique custom business awards for our customer, there are many more steps involved, the routering is only the beginning of this process at CNCROi.com.

When it comes to flattening, it’s the same process whether I do this using hardwood slabs or my own laminated hardwood slabs.

Using fresh router bits to produce a solid and clean carving on these custom business awards is important, there were over 20 different processes involved with carving these deceptively simple looking awards but you can see the chip load is perfect, not powder and not chunks.

As I do with our SandboxRanch.com banks, I leave a very slight skin at the bottom of these custom corporate awards so that they stay together during production, it requires a bit more work but it’s better than having them fly off the router during production, the bandsaw does quick work of separating them.

I error on the side of caution, making the skin a bit thicker than I’d normally do it, it doesn’t matter as the next step is sanding it off, a thicker ledge just requires more sanding at CNCROi.com to remove.

After going through a whole series of grits up to 600, it was time to go-ahead and cut a whole bunch more custom business awards, this time, using the lighter colored Maple that I glued-up at the same time, that slab I made at CNCROi.com was significantly heavier!

That’s the nice thing about using hardwood slabs, there is a lot less sanding involved because you have things very close to spec as soon as the blade meets the wood, like the video showing the sycamore awards above.

As with the smaller slab of darker awards, flattening both sides is required to shave off the glue and show-off the absolutely perfect seamless seams that only using a router can produce for this type of lamination.

It’s such a pleasure to work with a clean slab that is both dead-flat and parallel, it takes quite a bit of work to get to this point but wow does it make production of these custom business awards at CNCROi.com so much easier.

Carving out Maple is no different than carving our Poplar, Oak, MDF or even Fir at CNCROi.com, you just need to modify the speeds and feeds slightly to account for harder or softer wood as otherwise, your chip load will be off which produces uneven results.

Again, I can’t emphasize how important it is to have perfect chip load during the routering of these awards, although all the exterior surfaces will be sanded, the inside cannot and will not, as a result, if there is any slight movement or issue with the programming, the 3D printed part of this custom business award WILL NOT FIT inside as those were 3D printed before the awards were fabricated.

I’ve been playing around with concepts and ideas for awards almost since I started CNCROi.com as I learned how to use laser machines for my old employer in Australia, Everight.com where I worked before moving back to North America.

Carving out one unit is easy, carving out 15 is a whole other prospect as I could have just gotten lucky for the perfect fit and production on one unit, but that luck runs dry exponentially as the volume increases, hence, the focus on perfect chip load and production to make sure nothing moves from start to finish at CNCROi.com.

As the main body of these custom business awards is being carved-out, I’m going over it with a second vacuum (the first being in the head of the router) to remove additional chips and stuff that accumulates quite quickly during the fabrication process so I can more clearly see how things are progressing and change things as required.

CNC routing is a deceptively simple process, the problem with these machines is that they do exactly what you tell them, and as a result, if you tell them to do something stupid, they will do it without question, hence going over the work with digital calipers and trying to keep everything as clean as possible to double and triple check my programming throughout the Maple carving process.

You’ll notice the nesting is also quite tight on these custom business awards as they are being carved, without that little skin underneath, they’d all be flying all over the shop, having, literally, a solid base holding them all in place allows this to be done quickly, efficiently and properly at CNCROi.com.

When it comes to custom corporate awards, we can literally make them out of anything, bullet proof glass is a popular one.

It always impresses me how such a massive machine can do such fine and delicate work, this stuff is child’s play to a industrial behemoth like this.

You can see that no matter how much I try, the router throws chips all over the place, even with a powerful extractions system in the head that gets the vast majority of the chips, this is really a wood chipper.

After the carving of the lighter colored Maple custom business awards is complete, the next step is, like the darker ones, to cut it out using our bandsaw before, you guessed it, lots and lots of sanding working my way through the grits.

From the first to the last, all of these custom business awards look fantastic, I was dodging some imperfections in the wood, hence the steps in the above picture are a little “off”.

I’m rather fond of making custom novelty awards that really stand-out, it’s fun when the customer sends you a sketch and from that, you make their dreams a reality.

You can see straight out of our CNC router, these custom business awards are looking great, you can also see the router “steps” during the finishing pass using our finishing bit, the carving is initially done with a chip breaker and then afterwards, a bit with a nicer profile to get rid of the big carving marks that the other bit makes.

These custom Maple bases are now ready for their massive clean-up so let’s change tracks and move onto the metal processing aspect of this custom business award at CNCROi.com.

For this custom business award, we wanted a shiny profile along the edges, as such, the laser was a better choice than the waterjet and the fine hole from which the 3D printed rod would slide into was too fine a detail to do properly using our plasma cutter.

The metal we used for the custom corporate award blades is 304 stainless steel 2B, the thickness was about 1/16″ or roughly a mm and a half or 16 ga.

Probably the most complex award I ever designed is my electronics award, it was fun seeing just how deep the rabbit hole goes and just how much neat stuff I could come-up with.

I also had fun designing a simpler award, my physics award too.

What made this project “tough” was actually not any individual part but the putting together of all the different components to fabricate the final award, so many different machines and tooling was used and the fact that it all slid in perfectly is a testament to the incredible synergy that’s possible with CNC equipment at CNCROi.com.

When it comes to laser cutting metal, it works wonders on thinner gauges, it’s fast, there is no under or overspray and the dross is kept to a minimum, but it is very much a different CNC than a plasma cutter, neither is better than the other, they just do similar things within different production envelopes.

Of course, if full metal and only metal is your interest for your custom award, that’s no problem for CNCROi.com!

In this case, the fiber laser is cutting the awards, afterwards, a different fiber laser will be permanently etching the surface of them with the award winner’s details, so for the whole custom business award, three different lasers were actually used at CNCROi.com.

I was trying to keep the blades set-up in different production batches on the sheets as there were so many of them and each of the 8 on the award is slightly different, so doing all of one type at a time made things easier as it minimized the amount of sorting that would be required afterwards at CNCROi.com.

After fiber laser cutting all the stainless steel blades on the custom business awards, it was time to employ another fiber laser to etch them permanently.

Fiber laser etching will not fade, crack or peel overtime, it’s not affected by temperature neither, as a result, it’s the perfect way to permanently brand steel at CNCROi.com.

There is no end to the creativity you can showcase with your award, whether you design it yourself, hire a designer or have us help with the design and material selection, you are in very capable hands with us.

After the blades were all etched using our fiber laser, the next step was doing the same with the Maple bases, but this time, on the same machine, switching it over to CO2 as it produces a finer result than fiber when it come to wood engraving.

The nice thing about engraving into wood is that it produces two types of contrast, the first being the engraving itself with the burned charcoal at the base and the sides of the laser carving, the second contrast are the shadows created by producing some depth into the wood.

The custom business awards were going through several streams of sanding, each one cleaning them up more and more, removing imperfections and smoothing them out more and more at CNCROi.com.

Each wood has it’s own unique style, for a while, I was making a lot of custom plaques using Acacia!

After the laser engraving was complete, the final round of sanding across all surfaces, except the inside cavity that the 3D print was to be slotted in (you can’t see inside anyways and roughness is a feature for friction adhesion) was complete.

After cleaning-up the fiber laser cut and etched stainless steel, that sanded as well in several rounds, it was time to mate everything together with some, somewhat redundant at this stage, double sided tape at the bottom of the base at CNCROi.com.

Of course, if you want a recognition plaque made to showcase all the individuals that made your goals a reality, we can help you there too!

The first award was all set-up and it was then time to do the same for all the others fabricated at CNCROi.com.

Of course, each custom business award was different, so to keep things proper, meaning the information on the bases matched the information required on the stainless steel blades, I printed out each specification at the beginning before the first wood chip was produced, that’s why you see those black buckets, each one held the components for that specific award throughout the fabrication process.

CNCROi.com has extensive experience making plaques of all kinds, indoors and out, so be as creative as you want and challenge us!

To give you an idea what’s possible using fiber laser etching on stainless steel, check this out.

The final awards, once all finished and ready to go, were put in far nicer boxes of their own to be given out during event night by the client.

Of course, light hits stainless steel and Maple differently depending on the angle and so forth, so my pictures in the shop don’t do justice to what a professional photographer is capable of, below is a photo taken by Liam Dousti courtesy of Building Transformations.

Need custom business awards? Any shape, size or spec you can imagine, CNCROi.com can make them and ship it right to your door!