Custom Wooden Greeting Cards: Custom CNC Laser Engraved & Cut

I’ve showcased a lot of custom birthday, anniversary and special event cake toppers but not many custom wooden greeting cards. Here’s a simple one made by CNCROi.com using MDF.

We finished a job in MDF recently and this project fit perfectly from those scraps, we try to utilize as much material as we can throughout our production, it saves money, the environment and greatly reduces wastage of otherwise perfectly great material.

Here’s another view, our Austrian CNC laser is MASSIVE, we have lots of space and as a result, can do huge production runs without any problems. We also have over 13 inches of clearance, so even big awkward parts are no match for CNCROi.com.

This custom MDF cupcake was optimized from a drawing provided to us, there are only 3 lines of engraving in the whole design as a result, this is generally what takes the longest as with our cutting passes, we can move over 3 Gs so it’s lightning fast.

CNC laser engraving happens line by line, must like your regular office inkjet or laser printer, ours just does the same thing without using any ink across a far larger area and for a lot more material than paper, though yes, we can laser engrave paper too.

The bottom two lines say “happy birthday Alexis” followed by the date in French, the age of the student is at the top, which is being engraved right now in the photo below.

We spend a lot of time optimizing designs for our machine, this saves money for our customers as we save on a lot of machine time. Why do we care? Because our goal, even as we get busier and busier, is to get most project started and shipped same-day!

Using cut lines as engraving lines is one such way to get a lot more done in a shorter amount of time, we probably save about 10x the time going this route rather than CNC laser engraving all the detail going left to right on this design alone.

Some of our customers provide us with projects in the THOUSANDS of units, so all that optimization experience is applied to everything else we do as we never know when “one job” will become a huge number of units or a customer will send us a project file that needs to be done ASAP.

Part of running a custom CNC shop is not knowing what will come through the door, as we aren’t open to the public, we get calls and emails throughout the day with quote requests and jobs that need to be done ASAP. Last week for instance, we had a small polycarbonate stencil job that needed to be shipped to New York to arrive “tomorrow” and we were able to make it because we finished-up our other jobs efficiently earlier in the day.

CNC laser cutting produces lots of smoke, which makes filming a bit of a challenge but also creates lots of controlled fire. In this case, it was fine, it adds additional beauty to the final MDF cupcake but if you didn’t want this, we’d generally mask it.

Here are the final results of CNC laser engraving and cutting a custom cupcake out of MDF hardboard. The results are repeatable, sharp and look great!

Keep in mind that we could have made this out of any material, real wood veneer, polycarbonate, corian, stainless steel, laminate, acrylic and the endless list goes on. The application, budget and volume will dictate which route will be taken for any given project.

This is a relatively simple design but our industrial CNC laser has no problem doing it, what’s really neat is that we did some custom PCB board engraving before this job for one of our clients and stone engraving after, using the same machine!

The diversity of our offerings and services is as grand as our client base, whatever custom you need, CNCROi.com is here to help you with top quality service and in many cases, 24 hour turnaround times. Contact us right now!