Custom Novelty Badge in REAL Mahogany Wood

February 2, 2017 Jon Off CNC Laser, CNCROi.com News, Wood Products,

Today at CNCROi.com I’m making a custom novelty badge using REAL Mahogany high-quality wood veneer.

I didn’t make a video of this name badge being made as it’s identical in process to an earlier video I made which, I have to admit, does a very good job summarizing the possibilities.

When it comes to custom novelty badge options, either for corporate professional or purely for giggles, CNCROi.com can make them using a large variety of materials, from metals like stainless steel to anodized aluminium to lamacoids, laminates and even several dozen types of real woods.

As this is real mahogany wood, it will need to be masked just to make clean-up easier and less sanding being required to produce the finished custom novelty badge.

Due to the fact that we start from raw materials and build your custom novelty badge from scratch, it means each can be the same or different due to our on-demand production methods.

This also extends to sizing, meaning you have them all at different sizes, shapes and designs and it still counts as a volume order as far as CNCROi.com is concerned.

With CNCROi.com, you are not stuck into a pre-formatted box where you just fill in the blanks, you have total customization in every way possible.

We also have a full in-house design capability so if you need a bunch of custom novelty badges but aren’t sure how to go about sending us a design that will work, we can definitely help you out!

What’s really nice about laser engraved custom novelty badge production on wood, like Mahogany, is the nice deep brown contrasting color that is produced.

This vaporizing of wood to produce a darker color also adds depth which makes a slight shadow and makes the custom novelty badge stand out all the more.

The flash of light that you see is the instantly vaporized Mahogany that’s produced when it’s hit by our industrial Austrian CNC laser.

The laser is only “on” when it goes over that specific area I wish to have engraved, it’s also extremely fast which is why the camera generally captures many points of light instead of one even if only “one” is produced at a time as the overhead gantry moves over the Mahogany custom novelty badge.

With the unlimited material, size and design options CNCROi.com offers you, we need to know a few things before making a proposal to you.

How many custom novelty badges (or professional name tags) do you want?
When do you need to get the badges?
What are your material preferences?
What is your budget?

Based on these four questions, which generally apply to just about everything we do here in the shop, we can suggest options and designs that suit what you want.

There is no point is us offering you titanium etched custom novelty badge if your budget and volume only support something printed with paper spit out by our inkjet printer.

If you happen to be a material producer or manufacturer, we can also use your off-cuts and left overs to produce your custom novelty badge as well.

We had one customer that produced cardboard, guess what we used to make amazing looking custom novelty badge for all their staff at an upcoming conference? It was the perfect material for a one-time application that got them noticed!

Acrylic is also an often overlooked material that works great with custom novelty badge production in any volume.

The advantage of acrylic name tags is that it’s available in a wide variety of different colors, transparencies and has a nice flame polished edge to it.

This is especially nice with neon acrylic which I’ll get around to doing a video about at a later date for CNCROi.com to show you.

Another material to consider is plastic lamacoids and laminates, wonderful material especially for custom novelty badge manufacturing because they are so light weight and available in hundreds of color combinations for ultimate branding contrast.

If you have imagery that’s complicated for a custom novelty badge, my suggestion is to simplify it as these tend to be rather small (that’s why it’s a badge and not a sign).

As such, although this is an extreme example, this video shows you some of the decisions you need to make if you are going down the complexity route.

If you had a design like this ship as a custom novelty badge, the level of detail at a quarter of the scale you wouldn’t have trouble reading the text and making out the finer details of the boat regardless of material.

As for cost of a custom novelty badge, the highest end of the spectrum has to be annealed stainless steel with exotic woods and anodized aluminium being a close second.

They can all have the same magnetic backing, it’s the material that’s “out front” that costs the most especially as you go into custom shapes and unique design elements.

At roughly the same size as a custom novelty badge, but for another application (though could be just as easily a badge), our custom welding tags without holes make for wonderful badges as well for some of our industrial customers.

As our industrial laser works its way up engraving the Mahogany custom novelty badge, you notice the smoke build-up on the protective wrap.

We can either spend time sanding the badge after producing it or mask it and do a few light touches afterwards.

What do you do if you want a custom novelty badge without a name that can be used by a variety of people but you still want the custom look and feel?

CNCROi.com makes a lot of custom whiteboards and guess what, a small dry-erase whiteboard or chalk blackboard makes for a wonderful custom novelty badge too!

Just another option to consider, at least with us, you have OPTIONS!

All we do is custom, day in and out, so all this experience can be applied directly towards your projects, big or small, lots or only a few.

Going back a few steps to plastic lamacoid or laminate custom novelty badges, this video is a wonderful summary of what a “fake metal look” if real metal annealed wasn’t a possibility with your design choice or volume / budget / timeline considerations.

As for resolution, although we can hit a thousand DPI, going over 600 DPI is rarely needed as the eye can’t make-out the difference at these small sizes, especially at networking events where there is always some movement and distractions all around the user.

For this custom novelty badge, there was no need for a magnetic backing and the lines for the cutting don’t fit perfectly as that’s the way this was designed to be.

There is no right or wrong way to have a custom design made using any material or application you have in mind, drop all those conventions at the door and let your creative mind be free with CNCROi.com!

Now that the engraving pass is completely done on this custom novelty badge, it’s time to begin cutting it.

The amount of smoke and resin released during the cutting process is a lot more than engraving because more material is vaporized by comparison, engraving is removing about 1/16 to 1/32 inches of material while the cut is going straight through the 1/8th inch Mahogany wood material.

The nice thing about custom fabricating things on-demand is that this custom novelty badge could have just as easily scaled right-up into a sign either using the same material or something completely different.

If you want anything made custom, CNCROi.com has the equipment, passion and experience to pull it off just for you!

Plywood is also a wonderful material for a custom novelty badge that CNCROi.com can also make to spec!

With the power of our industrial laser, we can cut through half-inch or 18 mm thick wood as easily as any other material out there, though a bit too thick for a custom novelty badge.

We control fire with our laser, as a result, there is some fire that is produced every once in a while when we are cutting wood, it’s due to our highly compressed air shooting down onto the work and extraction under and around the table that it doesn’t have a chance to build-up.

You can now see that this custom novelty badge is finished, everything cut perfectly and it’s looking a little rough due to the smoke build-up on the surface.

Now you know why it has been masked to begin with, clean-up is relatively easy as all that soot is on the mask, not the Mahogany wood veneer underneath.

One more look at this custom novelty badge before we go about removing the protective masking.

The nice thing about anodized aluminium is the color possibilities when it comes to the surface anodization.

CNCROi.com keeps in stock a wide variety of sizes, colors and thicknesses of these custom novelty badges for a wide variety of applications.

Whether you require a dozen, a hundred or thousands of custom novelty badges, CNCROi.com can get right into production with current inventory and produce more to fulfill your requirements.

You’ll notice this custom novelty badge has a few smoke stains on the surface, but overall, the protective masking did an amazing job, so a few passes using our industrial sander and it’s quickly fixed-up!