Do what you love, love what you do!
There are three constants in the CNCROi.com shop, the first are lots of hours of testing and production, the second, creating content for the blog and website and the third, passion bringing custom to our customers around the world!
Testing and Production
There is such an endless variety of materials out there beyond your standard woods and metals, its astounding what our customers come-up with application wise that require us to do some testing on swathes before proceeding to the quote and production schedule. For instance, you have specialized military grade coatings on specialty metals that our fiber laser does amazing work, plated material and some processes that I still don’t understand “how they did it” (I can’t see it as I lack clearance) but they did and it needs engraving or surface marking.
On the plastics front, we are just finishing-up a big run of polycarbonate followed by acrylic of various thicknesses and material qualities. You’d think that plastic is plastic but nope, it’s not that straight forward. For instance, some plastics color change wonderfully using our fiber laser and cut like a dream with our CO2 laser (both sources in our Austrian dual-sourced industrial wide format laser) but that isn’t always the case.
What I really enjoy about testing (CNCROi.com doesn’t charge for material testing nor set-up) is that it’s a black box regarding results and the only way to get something that the customer likes at the highest possible ROI (return on investment) is testing and more testing, it’s really a fun process!
Content Creation
As we get increasingly busy, finding time to write and make videos with photos of content to post to our blog becomes more of a challenge. It is important though to take “time out” from regular shop work to get the ball rolling though as it’s a wonderful resource for us and our clients as to how things are done. It’s also provided invaluable as part of our general testing and production techniques to further optimize processes in the shop.
I’m surprisingly behind on this front too, we have an industrial sand blaster that has yet to make an appearance in any content which gets very regular use for customer projects among lots of other neat things in the shop! Updates to equipment like new lenses for the laser, bits for the CNC router and a host of other cool material options. Then optimal nesting software, hardware options… it never really ends!
The CNCROi.com is as lean as possible and a contributing factor to that is the fact that we film and take photos in the shop, if it’s a mess then our clients will see that in the content we produce! Keeping things clean is an ongoing effort though, it’s amazing how dirty a shop becomes after doing a major production run of polycarbonate or MDF with associated dust and black finger prints everywhere.
There is also a steady stream of raw materials coming into the shop and being shipped out for happy clients around the world (literally!). So, having things organized one week generally means it’s a mess the next, so time must be taken to re-organize things especially after huge production runs.
Passionate Customer Service
I absolutely love what I do, it isn’t unheard of me coming in the shop early in the morning and leaving very late at night, trying to get a customer’s project to them as efficiently as possible. Truth be told, especially for larger production runs, when you establish a flow, you really want to keep it going from start to finish as much as possible.
Things are always changing from one day to the next and cutting things off around the end of the production cycle then doing the other few units the next day is really something I try to avoid as much as possible for consistency with client receivables. There is no clock in the shop for that reason! The shop closes when the customer project is done though for week-long production runs, stages are established of course.
All of these activity take time, sending production updates to customers so they know how their stuff is coming along, resolving any issues with them and sending material samples are all part of running a custom CNC shop. Each and everyday is different, materials change, capabilities increase and there is always more equipment to put on the wish list but overall, I really enjoy the entire process!
I’m lucky enough to have found what I love to do and get paid to do it!
Contact us!
Looking for a dependable, passionate and enthusiastic shop to make something awesome for you? Contact CNCROi.com right now!
