Custom Foam Drawer Inserts: Aerospace Grade Foam

April 2, 2018 Jon Off CNC Laser, CNCROi.com News, Plastic Products,

Custom foam drawer inserts made by CNCROi.com are do so using aerospace grade foam, it’s dramatically more durable than typical foam and cuts very nicely with our Austrian CNC laser.

Custom foam drawer inserts are great for a huge variety of applications, from protecting specialized tooling from damage during operations or shipping.

In this case, these custom foam drawer inserts are for a concert venue to hold their musical instruments and related equipment so that anything missing is noticed immediately before bringing them from place to place.

When it comes to custom foam drawer inserts, any shape is possible from CNCROi.com, rounds, curves, straight angles, any outline of tooling or instruments that you have, we can reproduce faithfully for your business.

You can see the microphone and the related holders in the above picture, so even rounded and square items, ANY SHAPE can be precisely cut with our Austrian wide-format industrial laser cleanly and repeatedly.

The edges of the aerospace grade custom foam drawer inserts are nice and sealed due to the heated cutting process of our CNC laser, this means there are no pockets or holes or multiple scratches that weaken the structure edge wise.

Generally CNCROi.com doesn’t apply any double sided tape and we also suggest to our custom foam drawer inserts customers to not glue these together, the reason being that if a layer gets damaged, we can cut a replacement layer no problem and you just drop it back in place.

Of course, we can also permanently laser engrave tooling as well to match a department where we make the tool inserts for.

There is some smoke residue on the back side, this doesn’t matter because we’ve never made a custom foam drawer inserts that needed to be double sided, though we can use protective paper if required.

As for color and combinations thereof, custom foam drawer inserts can be made using yellow, blue, black, white, red and we can also go custom color (though no pantone color matching).

We generally don’t advise to go with white custom foam drawer inserts because they look dirty right away in just about any production environment after a little bit of use, black is by far the best color for the “front” layer and the backing can be any color but again, white isn’t a good choice on that front.

The custom foam drawer inserts can be made at any size as well, big drawers, small drawers, deep drawers using multiple layers or shallow drawers with only one layer of aerospace grade foam.

CNCROi.com generally sends out our custom foam drawer inserts with the pieces inside because it becomes very useful when you have multiple layers and tooling that isn’t totally flat to have them available.

Whether it’s stainless steel or aluminium, we can permanently brand everything that would go into a typical shop.

Shipping custom foam drawer inserts is also a breeze, they take-up a lot of volume but weight close to nothing and as they are foam, damage isn’t possible and they can’t break due to impacts from any angle.

CNCROi.com has done a lot of testing using various foams and eventually settled on aerospace grade foam due to it’s very dense structure, ease of use with our industrial laser and how well it protects our customer’s assets.

The reason for the contrasting backing on our custom foam drawer inserts is to show right away that a tool hasn’t been place in the drawer which helps keep shops tidy between shifts and makes it very apparent immediately if any tooling was stolen or misplaced.

As for sending CNCROi.com the files to generate the custom foam drawer inserts, we have some clients who send us an outlined scan of their tools generated by hand using a marker while others take a photo as reference and from there, generate a CAD document from which we work from.

You can see from the above to the picture below, all the corners are nice and sharp, there are no chips, splits or rough edges, everything is evenly cut to absolute perfection within 15 nanometers of accuracy.

CNCROi.com has made a lot of custom foam drawer inserts through the years, we generally make them using aerospace grade foam but we can also make them out of any other material, plywood though polycarbonate.

Now that the overlay custom foam drawer inserts are finished, it’s time to cut the underlay and it was our customer that decided on red on black, generally we use yellow to incredible contrast but red does just as wonderful a job.

These red foam underlays don’t have any pieces cut out of them, just the outline of the whole drawer they will be slotted into, this allows for perfect fit between the overlay and underlay when place together in the drawer as inserts.

The custom foam drawer inserts are all laser cut and shipped as one package, this makes putting it together in a drawer very easy for our customer at the other end.

At CNCROi.com, we focus on producing the best quality custom foam drawer inserts we can, regardless of material and we can also mix and match them, meaning if you want a high quality and bullet proof upper layer like clear polycarbonate followed by the aerospace grade foam then a plywood base, no problem.

We are focused on producing what you need for your application, some tools are extremely heavy or sharp or specialized and what works for one customer might not for another.