Custom Unique Awards: Maple + Polycarbonate

CNCROi.com specializes in making custom unique awards, none of that imported dime a dozen garbage is coming from our shop!

At my company, we start from raw materials, in this case, kiln dried live edge Maple and a sheet of polycarbonate, you can’t get anymore basic than this short of planting my own trees and cutting them at my own sawmill.

For these custom unique awards, we’ll be using the same tooling but in different ways to account for material differences, yes, CNCROi.com is using our full sheet CNC router to cut both the polycarbonate and the live edge Maple.

But we are using different bits, one optimized for wood on the Maple and another optimized for plastics, at different feeds and speeds of course.

Above you can see what the optically clear polycarbonate will become after fiber laser color changing, the award you see in the above picture was made over two years ago, the one under it just a few moments ago, both are identical!

If you want to see where the polycarbonate came from, you can see it in the video above.

Like most plastics, if you run the router bit too slow or too fast, you end-up with a mess, either material melting back into itself or your bit breaking, and the tolerance curve for polycarbonate is especially tight as the material has zero give, it’s incredibly hard material when cutting it out.

So yes, CNCROi.com is literally using bullet proof glass to make the front part of the clear custom unique award… and we wouldn’t have it any other way!

Many of our awards are made from a single material, it’s cost-effective and if the even warrants it, a very straight forward production schedule can be maintained over an extended period of time.

All those little chips of polycarbonate building-up around the router bit as it moves along have the same consistency and color profile as rice, this is exactly what you want for plastics, it means you aren’t making a mess of things and clean-up is incredibly easy.

To help with keeping things flat and not moving, CNCROi.com employs our vacuum table, it sucks these parts down perfectly during the whole CNC router cutting process.

There is a protective film on both sides of the polycarbonate, as such, the optically clear aspect of the award is protected until the very last step of screwing it into the solid Maple backing using offsets.

Custom corporate awards can be as simple or as fancy as your budget and timeline allow, we can even design it virtually first if the complexity warrants it.

The next step along our journey of creating custom unique awards is kiln dried live edge Maple, this is a little more than an inch thick, so it has a solid weight to it, as does the polycarbonate, giving both beauty and gravitas to the awards we are making in this round.

When it comes to live edge, you can see the hold-down is very different, vacuum tables are useless with this so lots of screws are required to make sure things stay flat happy while our CNC router makes quick and precise work of making the wooden aspect of these custom unique awards.

You can tell just by the amount of material that the bit size is different, for the Maple, we are using a 5/8″ bit while with the polycarbonate, it was a 1/8″, both are great for their own unique purpose.

When it comes to custom unique awards, we can mix and match materials or go with all one material, the choices are completely up to you.

Live edge wood is a great medium to work from, if it isn’t kiln dried though, it’s a mess… bugs and future warping becoming a big problem, hence why CNCROi.com only uses kiln dried wood for our custom unique awards.

Some cuts are very close to the edge, as you can see in the above picture, as little of this wonderful live edge Maple will be wasted, every little bit of this will be used for this job and others coming after it at CNCROi.com with the rest going to the fire pit!

You can see the tabs very well on the wood, it makes sure things are held in place as no vacuum table works with live edge that hasn’t been flattened shortly before cutting it out at CNCROi.com.

After sanding all sides and removing the tabs of the Maple, it’s time to laser engrave them with the graphic that’s needed on this custom unique award.

Not all custom unique awards have to cost a million dollars, some can be made for a lot less from just a sheet of plywood and be just as gratifying to receive by the winner.

Like the polycarbonate where we use our fiber laser to color change the surface, for the Maple, CNCROi.com is using it’s CO2 laser source to permanently branding the wood as well.

Laser engraving Maple does leave some residue on the surface but it’s easily sanded off, especially when I have more than an inch thick material to work with, sanding is no problem as the backing is very rigid and easily held in the palm of my hand.

Whatever you can imagine, CNCROi.com can produce it for you, feel free to challenge us, we look forward to beating expectations!

Although this image isn’t of the actual production run I did, it was all covered under NDA, it does showcase what’s possible, literally any mix of text and vector images works totally fine for us!

After sanding, you can see how the award looks like in two sections, the polycarbonate on the left was done over two years ago, it has a few light scratches but still very solid and the Maple was done just a few moments ago, you can also notice the holes that the offset bolts and screws will use to mate these two pieces together.

And the finished custom unique award looks amazing, of course, it would have your branding and message on there but as a demonstration as to what’s possible, this works great for the intended purpose.

Any mix of shapes, sizes or materials work to make your very own custom unique award by CNCROi.com… made to spec and shipped right to your door!

Want a custom unique award? Contact us right now!