Custom Delrin Keychains: CNC Router & CNC Laser

Custom Delrin keychains are a great way to promote your business as the material is ultra-durable, routers out relatively clean and can also be laser engraved with a high level of precision.

Delrin acetal homopolymer (Polyoxymethylene POM) is actually a wonderful material for applications where metal won’t work but the same strength, low friction and high wear resistance with stiffness is required – of course, making custom delrin keychains out of the stuff is wicked overkill but that’s what I do at CNCROi.com.

Unlike metal, delrin machines relatively easily, it produce a good consistent chip and if I had to do this job in metal, there would have been the necessity for a lot of auxiliary process to keep the bit cold like flood coolant and/or more specialized lubrication systems to prevent the bit from getting warm.

If you are wondering what we typically use delrin for at the shop, it’s to make custom seals.

As I do not have a tool changer, the biggest challenge on this job at CNCROi.com was finding a bit that could literally do all the processes, Delrin is INCREDIBLY SLIPPERY and as such, the vacuum table is useless and a lot of hold-down is required to make sure nothing moves though each of the machining processes.

The sheets of black delrin used to make these custom delrin keychains came pre-cut and it worked out great as it was the perfect size to hold down properly as each and every keychain went through it’s MANY operations to produce a finished part.

Sometimes I have more fun making the keychain holder than the keychains themselves.

When it comes to vibrations, that’s another thing that travels very well through delrin, mix that with an incredibly low surface friction but with a bit chomping through each piece, I quickly realized that I had to literally produce one custom delrin keychain at a time, doing multiples just created a lot of shrapnel flying all across the shop.

Unlike wood though, these chips are uniform and don’t get airborne, I was actually using the dust system on this project and it worked very well, but there was such a distance between the intake and the actual work that only the finest pieces made it up the chute.

It may look messy, and it is, those little pieces of Delrin from the custom Delrin keychains were everywhere in the shop by the time this job was done, but they are easily picked-up and overall, it’s actually one of the cleaner materials to work with, especially compared to MDF which produces incredibly fine dust.

Acrylic is a popular choice with custom keychains, it’s pretty durable, relatively strong and can be had in a variety of colors and transparencies.

There are several passes done on each piece, the first is removing the inner parts, and then cleaning up the surface quality with a 0.001″ fine pass, then repeating the same on the outside then breaking the edges – so a ball nose for the whole job was the perfect tool.

There were two types of custom delrin keychains being made in this production run, I tried initially mixing and matching them to produce the same quantity but this caused production problems so I resorted to doing one first followed by the other design, again, there is a lot of waste material but I just had three tabs holding the pieces with zero vacuum working, hence, these pieces were very prone to going airborne during production if any vibrations occurred.

You can see in the image above how the tabs were broken, just a hammer and a very sharp chisel did the job, I tried so many different methods to hold things down and this was literally the only one that worked and produced consistent results but it required a lot of clean-up after production at CNCROi.com.

Metal keychains are also a wonderful option depending on the volume and branding requirements you have.

After CNC routering many sheets of delrin to produce the custom delrin keychains, the next step was to clean them all up, that was alone a few days of work, cleaning-up machining marks, wearing down the tabs and cleaning-up both front and back surfaces of each and every piece.

The next step thereafter was to laser engrave each and every one with custom branding, to do this consistently, I just made a typical laser cut MDF jig using CNCROi.com‘s CNC laser.

It took a few tries to get the shape dialed in, I required the jib to have almost zero give but yet, enough to easily allow me to place and take-out the pieces after the laser engraving process. It’s a very fine art.

I’ve made TONS of jigs at CNCROi.com and my go-to material is MDF more often than not, it’s cheap, it’s relatively strong and I always have scraps of it in the shop that are looking to ending their career in the jig industry.

Of course with CNCROi.com, you aren’t limited to only keychains, we can also make custom holders for them too!

Unlike our CNC router, the laser is a non-contact method, meaning the laser never touches the material so it means that there aren’t any hold-down issues involved with making jigs on our laser vs making jigs at CNCROi.com using our router.

After all the inside parts were cut out, it was time to go-ahead and start to cut out the jig from the scrap around it so that I can start laser engraving the custom delrin keychains.

But first, I wanted to do a quick test to make sure that the branding was correct across the products I was about to stick into it.

When it comes to making custom keychains, each material has their own esthetic appeal.

Everything checked-out, it was now time to start laser engraving all the cleaned-up custom Delrin keychains I spent the previous days making and more days cleaning-up for this final process.

These custom Delrin keychains will be tumbled afterwards, so the smoke you see on the surface comes right off, the engraving is precise and deep, ideally I could have done these during production but the logo was so fine that I would have had to do a bit change and the bit would be so small, it would probably break half the time anyways.

A big production run of custom Delrin keychains was complete, all the branding was at the right spot, nice and sharp.

Need custom keychains? Contact CNCROi.com right now!