Custom Lego UV Printing Jig Prototype
CNCROi.com keeps on expanding it’s offerings for print shops wanting to get repeatable and reliable jigs made for their specific production needs, in this case, we’ll be prototyping a custom Lego UV printing jig which will then be used to make full sized ones for their manufacturing processes.
To make all this testing as seamless as possible – the client just shipped me their exact Lego guys to work from – I use my tried and true 12 000 pound beast, Thermwood CNC router, probably the only one in existence that doesn’t do cabinetry work day in and out!
To give you an idea of perspective, the table on my machine is 5 ft x 10 ft, this jig, is a fraction of that, as such, wicked overkill for such a project, but that’s the way I like things at CNCROi.com, it makes things so much easier than having not enough power or precision to make something at a high precision requirements.
When it comes to UV printing jigs, we’ve done pretty much any and every type using a variety of materials including MDF.
This custom Lego UV printing jig is deceptively easy, there has been a lot of testing getting these Lego guys and their components to fit perfectly within the jig I made for them, adjusting movements by fractions of inches to get just enough hold so they don’t move but not so much that they are hard to remove from the jig.
What makes this challenging is that I’m making these jigs with a minimum bit diameter of 1/8″, yes, I have and could go smaller at CNCROi.com to produce this specific custom Lego UV printing jig prototype, but the smaller the bit, the higher likelihood of it breaking, so going with as big as possible is always best.
Keep in mind that because our CNC router has a solid non-moving gantry, much of the vibration and other issues that could cause lots of repeatability issues simply do not exist, as such, the bit isn’t prone to strange movements of oscillations, everything is solid through on through at CNCROi.com.
When weight is a concern, among a few others, CNCROi.com makes custom UV printing jigs using HDPE.
The process of making this custom Lego UV printing jig prototype is pretty straight forward, get the basics down on junk MDF, then move onto the ultra expensive stuff for more fine tuning, the junk MDF is more cardboard than saw dust and resin while the ultra premium stuff I use for UV jigs (in this case) is more sawdust and resin than paper.
You can notice the difference right away between different grades of MDF by the chips or dust it creates, it’s a lot more like what you’d get from wood chips than cardboard chips, the MDF is also a lot heavier and stable.
It’s important to use the right material for the job, the reason is pretty straight forward, the higher the quality of products we produce for our customers at CNCROi.com, the more their business will grow and the more jigs they’ll have for us to make for them in the future!
For larger parts, laser cut layered acrylic works wonders for our UV printing customers.
What I like about UV printing is getting the absolute perfect fitting jig, some shapes are a lot easier than others, but these custom Lego UV printing jig have been the hardest to get right, by far, due to the very small nature and tight tolerance requirements.
There is no fast way to make custom Lego UV printing jig prototypes specifically, just test fit, make slight adjustments, then test fit again, and again, and again, till things are absolutely perfect for our CNCROi.com customer.
It’s quite amazing how much a half mm or fraction of an inch movement in a node can make a big difference in fit, and having a machine that can produce repeatable results is all the more critical as these will be used to make a lot more of then!
CNCROi.com has used this massive CNC router for thousands of projects through the years we’ve had it, and having lots of flexibility equipment wise really helps when it comes to making custom UV printing jigs because we can also make them using laser cut acrylic and MDF as well, each process has a cost and benefit but that choice has really helped us a lot to make the perfect jigs for our customers.
Mixing and matching different colored acrylics also helps our customers quickly sort out specific production lines to be made.
You’ll notice that each and every one of these cuts with our CNC router to produce this custom Lego UV printing jig prototype has different heights, that’s because these jigs are multi-layered, meaning some parts are deeper than others, this is what makes this challenging because each part has a different profile that must be accounted for in order to make them fit perfectly in place.
There is a lot of saw dust made making these custom Lego UV printing parts, the movements on our router are very fine and yes, CNCROi.com is being somewhat inefficient by going over some areas more than once, but there is only one way to get things perfect and once the recipe is sorted out, that’s what I stick with.
This is where having a tool changer is magnificent, I went years with my old CNC router that didn’t have one, I don’t know how I did it, the absolute precision a tool changer gives to production is amazing, haven grown into it, it would be hard for me to go back!
UV printer jigs of just about any size can be produced by CNCROi.com to suit just about any product need you may have.
The reason for changing tools is straight forward, there is no point in using a 1/8″ bit to cut out a custom Lego UV printing jig, might as well use a bigger bit so that it’s faster and produces a cleaner result, which is does.
After cutting out this custom Lego UV printing jig prototype, it’s a little clean-up and ship ready from our shop to the customer’s.
The photos don’t really do justice to just how precise this jig has become, it took a while to get a few finicky details sorted out but once they were, the fit, form and function was repeatedly perfect them then-on.
You can really see the different layers of the custom Lego UV printing jig in the photo below, all the hard work is pretty much done, now it’s time to send it to the customer for review!
Need custom custom UV jigs? Contact CNCROi.com right now!