Custom Corporate Noid Award
Making a custom corporate Noid award by CNCROi.com is as easily accomplished as an award that’s more formal, the only difference is the imagination behind the idea.
If you aren’t familiar with the Noid, its a character developed by Domino’s Pizza and it was featured prominently in their advertising for years – I don’t have a TV so I haven’t seen their commercials for over a decade but I wouldn’t doubt it’s still in rotation.
For this custom corporate Noid award, we decided based on the spec outlined to use 3/4″ 18 mm Pine, it’s cost-effective, very flexible and produces a wonderful warm contrasting laser engraving with a darker edge from CNCROi.com‘s Austrian wide-format industrial CNC laser.
This isn’t the first time CNCROi.com engraves a comic character onto Pine, here’s something I did a while back using live edge that came out just as great… something about the clean lines produced by an artist that really breaths a lot of life into these items!
The first step towards creating the custom corporate Noid award was getting the design sorted but after that, it was putting the Pine into the machine, CNCROi.com has done A LOT of custom Pine projects so we have all our settings and methodologies down.
As CNC laser engraving and cutting are a non-contact method, meaning the machine never touches the material like it does with our CNC router, we can have far tighter nesting and resolution tolerances as we aren’t limited by the diameter of a spinning bit, as such, this was done at a thousand DPI – overkill for sure, but if I can get a 5% improvement in the engraving doing this, then it’s worth it!
The other advantage of overkill resolution is that we greatly lessen the lines that can appear across the design that are produced by the laser going back and forth, higher resolution on the custom corporate Noid award means when CNCROi.com does a secondary pass onto it at a different resolution, you really can’t see any laser lines other than those produced naturally from the Pine grain pattern.
Of course, CNCROi.com doesn’t just work with wood, we do a lot of custom metal work too, here’s a tattoo artist who’s design I fiber laser etched onto 316 stainless steel.
Having ultimate flexibility in material, machine and design process is what allows CNCROi.com to produce really amazing work while still sticking to our general 24 hour turnaround time once the design is approved.
That tight line pattern you see in the “N” is actually the grain, not the laser, and to me, it really helps accentuate the overall design, the nice thing about woodwork with our amazing CNC laser is that the grain is yet another variable of uniqueness that’s essentially “free”, you don’t see this with our CNC router work.
Having more than one CNC machine in addition to a whole compliment of woodworking and metal working tools allows CNCROi.com to mix and match materials and create pretty unique items, so if this corporate Noid award wanted to have a metal base with a Pine top or the other way around, we could have made that too!
When it comes to engraving depth, there isn’t a two-way feedback system with the CNC laser, it just engraves based on power and speed settings, unlike our CNC router where we can be accurate within a fraction of a millimeter regarding depth requirements.
The advantage of using CNCROi.com‘s laser though is we get free contrast, otherwise, this project would require a paint fill if we made it exclusively using our CNC router, so there is no perfect machine or process, just the best of many options to produce the result our customers want on time and within budget.
When it comes to woodworking, there isn’t much CNCROi.com can’t do, Pine is a wonderful material for a lot of projects though because it’s easy to sand, engraves with a warm contrast and glues exceptionally well.
After the laser engraving and cutting process, it’s time to remove the protective masking in order to reveal the work that our awesome CNC laser did on this custom corporate Noid award.
You can see the smoke and resin that settled on the surface of the Noids, if it wasn’t for the masking, all of that would be on the Pine and would have to be sanded off, not a big deal, but doing things this way saves a lot of time.
Sometimes for more challenging design criteria, CNCROi.com needs to make a prototype to make sure what looks good on paper does so in real life as well.
Before proceeding though, I want to do a test fit to make sure the base fits into the Noid character, only this way can I be sure that it’s ready to be shipped once the sanding and varnishing is finished on these custom corporate Noid awards.
To save on sand paper, it’s always quicker and more efficient to just try to remove as much masking as possible BEFORE sanding, otherwise all the resins and smoke bind with the paper into our sander and if I’m going to do that, might as well not have masked it in the first place.
CNCROi.com has made a lot of custom corporate awards using a variety of materials, from stainless steel to Corian and everything in between.
You can see the before and after varnishing results in the image below, the varnish adds a lot more color and warmth to the overall award, I’m very happy with the grain pattern which is revealed in all it’s splendor as well on this Noid award.
As for the actual Noid, you can see how much of a difference a little varnish does on the Pine, it accentuates the Pine grain and surface qualities tremendously.
When it comes to custom corporate awards, any shape, any size, any material or design, CNCROi.com can make it for you!
The custom corporate Noid award came out great, I’m very proud to have been given the honor to make it and I know they’ll sit proudly on a mantle for decades to come!
Need a custom corporate award or sports trophy?
Contact CNCROi.com right now!