Custom Templates: Waterjet & Laser Cutting

Custom templates made by CNCROi.com can be made out of just about any material, whether you want something ultra-durable and strong like stainless steel or a one-time use using thin plastic or something in-between using polycarbonate.

A custom template allows you to quickly produce many units using the same design we’ve cut out for you accurately and is useful in a wide variety of applications where actually making multiple units isn’t cost-effective using the machinery that CNCROi.com has.

The first custom template we’ll take a look at is one CNCROi.com recently made using 14 GA 304 stainless steel where the customer will be using an angle grinder to help carve out the template details, tracing wasn’t an option and due to the strength of a grinder, anything but steel just won’t last.

Templates can take-on a variety of different shapes, sizes and purposes, here’s one we made a while back for a t-shirt company that needed strong acrylic custom templates to help with the manufacturing process.

Although this is the furthest thing apart from the 304 stainless steel template you see being waterjet cut in these photos, making the t-shirt templates out of steel wouldn’t have worked as the employees wouldn’t have been able to see the exact position of their work.

The custom templates can be as detailed and highly optimized as you wish, CNCROi.com can even scale them perfectly to suit different sizing while keeping everything else about the spec the same.

Let’s say you were manufacturing a widget that required precise positioning of branding across 4 different sizes but the branding agents were the same size regardless of the widget size, CNCROi.com can make you those four custom templates to match perfectly and depending on the material, it can last a few days or years.

Custom templates differ from custom stencils in that generally, stencils are used to paint or spray something onto something else, while custom templates are generally used more for precise alignment or positioning.

That being said, one person’s stencil is another person’s template depending on the application and material being used.

The advantage of making a stainless steel custom template is durability, it’s not only incredibly strong but depending on what you are using it for, such as applications with extreme heat or cold, or machinery that’s “rough” on a template, CNCROi.com can make it out of very thin or very thick steel to suit your needs.

When it comes to custom stencils, the CNC process we employ, whether it’s CNC laser, CNC waterjet or CNC router is optimized for the spec requited, as I often mention to customers, there is no perfect machine for the perfect process, just he closest to the best for that particular application BUT having the option of a few really helps us narrow things down cost and quality wise.

What is really nice about waterjet cutting metal is that we don’t have the issue of heat affected warping or zones that we’d possibly get (depending on the design) as with industrial CNC lasers or plasma, where waterjet is a cold cutting process, those other two use heat to do the cutting.

On most of the applications CNCROi.com works on, heat isn’t generally an issue but the versatility of CNC waterjet cutting is tough to best for a wide variety of custom template applications across a whole range of design and material specs.

If you want a custom stencil made out of very thin material that just needs to last a day or two during production, CNCROi.com can produce that for you.

But if you need something dramatically more durable, not a problem for us either!

Although the image below is a stencil, the same material, polycarbonate, is used for a lot of custom templates by our customers as well, the advantage of polycarbonate, mylar and other transparent plastics is that you can SEE THROUGH IT which helps a lot for accurate positioning.

Custom templates out of thin plastics can also be easily rolled-up and unlike metal, weight close to nothing, so transport is never an issue.

The sizing and spec of plastic are as endless as their metal and wooden counterparts, it really comes down to design, application and budget as to which route CNCROi.com suggests with your custom template needs.

Unlike acrylics though, polycarbonate is incredibly durable, strong and not brittle, so it won’t break if it hits a hard concrete floor.

There are a lot of different plastics out there that can be employed for custom templates, some of them are best cut using our laser, others waterjet and still others CNC router, it all depends on the design and specs involved.

CNCROi.com also makes custom templates out of MDF and other wooden materials, the advantage to those is that they are relatively inexpensive and can be pretty durable in most non-industrial settings.

What I really like about wooden custom templates is that they are easily modified by some of our customers in the field, this allows them for additional flexibility from their design specs if they aren’t totally sure as to how things will fit.

Unlike stainless steel, MDF can be easily sanded and worked a bit by just about anybody for that perfect fit while with stainless steel… well… good luck with that.

Need a custom template? Contact CNCROi.com right now!