Custom Recycling Stencils: Laser Cut MDF

Custom recycling stencils were required after I completed my outdoor garbage holder so bins were easily identified well into the future.

CNCROi.com makes stencils of all shape, designs, fonts and sizes – it’s something that’s incredibly useful – and when it comes to personal projects around the house, they are just as useful as those use by our industrial clients.

For this project custom recycling stencils just make a quick job easy rather than having to draw or paint by hand information onto the blue bins I had for recycling.

The advantage to stencils is that they can be used endlessly, and they make branding just about anything fast and easy, I used enamel paint but literally anything works well when it comes to making custom stencils.

I had some scrap 1/8″ 3 mm MDF from a recent job I completed so the timing was perfect to make these custom recycling stencils as I had just finished my outdoor garbage storage bin.

When it comes to custom stencils, polycarbonate is nice because you can see through it.

If I had to do this spray painting across hundreds of thousand of units, I would have made these CNCROi.com custom recycling stencils out of metal but as it was a one-off, something that’s quick and can be thrown into the fire pit afterwards was more than fine.

There really is endless possibilities for stencils, CNCROi.com makes them custom for one-offs or production cycles, out of metal for use of flame branding or polycarbonate for use on sidewalks, stencils are incredibly versatile, pay once, use a lot of times!

The four names for the recycling stencils were glass, paper, plastic and metal, but if I wanted to, I could have added additional information or even a graphic but for my purposes, even what I did was overkill.

Plywood stencils are great fun too, they are more cost-effective than metal but also greater care must be taken with them.

There are a few things you want to keep in mind when making custom stencil designs for CNCROi.com to cut, the BIGGEST is to make sure you are supporting inner letters, vowels and numbers.

For instance, the inside of o, b, p and so forth, should be supported, otherwise, they will just fall out and produce an ugly stenciling result.

You’ll notice for these custom recycling stencils, I used capitals as well, this I find makes it a lot easier to read than going with various sizes, the more standard your wording or images, the better when it comes to this specific application.

As for durability, nothing comes close to metal, so if you want something long lasting, that’s really the best way forward, for these 1/8″ 3 mm custom recycling stencils, I think they would have been OK for maybe 20-50 impressions and after that, begin to fall apart as they absorb paint and so forth.

The nice thing about using fire to make your branding using a CNCROi.com stencil is that you’ll never have to worry about clean-up, fire is a clean process.

If you have any doubts, make sure you go with something too strong for your application rather than not enough.

The laser is great for stencils because sharp inner corners can be produced, unlike our CNC router, which is faster but requires a spinning bit or our CNC plasma or waterjet dedicated to metals.

For these custom recycling stencils specifically, the font was selected for easy visibility, if you go with something narrower then it’s that much harder to properly spray paint and the more artistic you get, the more vague they generally become message wise.

The inside of the wordings were cut out before the final outside, this was a one-time use, so it didn’t perfectly fit on the scrap piece of MDF but that was fine to me.

Metal stencils are amazing, they last an extremely long time and are easily cleaned.

CNCROi.com will review your design before making a custom stencil, so you don’t need to worry if some elements are iffy, we’ll let you know what works and what doesn’t.

Now that these custom recycling stencils are finished, it was time to bring a can of spray paint with me back home and spray paint the empty recycling bins.

But first, it’s always a good idea to review the work, last thing you want to do is make a stencil with a mistake and then produce thousands of those before you discover it.

Yep, those bins look great, it does look a little hillbilly but I’m fine with that, it’s just recycling stencils, it isn’t going into a museum.

Need custom stencils? Contact CNCROi.com right now!