The Stencil Maker: Any Shape, Material or Size!
CNCROi.com is The Stencil Maker, able to produce custom stencils out of any shape, material or size to suit just about any application.
We’ve been making stencils for years, I get a lot of questions about our stencil making capabilities and generally speaking, we can make a stencil out of anything for anything but something I didn’t cover before are some of the tweaks that may be required in order to produce the optimal stencil for your design and application.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
One of the most important parts about the stencil is the design from which we make yours from, if the design doesn’t work then regardless of the material we use to make your stencil with, regardless of budget or volume, it won’t work well as a stencil.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
When it comes to metal stencils specifically, we’ve found that we can sometimes have heat or sand blasting issues, so if you have very sharp points or a stencil design with a very fragile outline, it’s generally better to go thicker over thinner.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
For instance, any very sharp edges that look like thin spikes might look great in theory but when making them out of acrylic for instance, the edge may be a bit melted because we have our Austrian wide-format industrial laser cutting at a sharp angle, as such, that sharp point will be smaller than the design you have made virtually.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
Another thing to consider is that when it comes to round things like circles, ovals and the like, make sure your design is based on a curve, meaning it isn’t a bunch of very small straight lines but an actual curved vector as otherwise, the edge quality of the stencil won’t be rounded but a series of very small lines.
We get that issue quite a bit when it comes to DXF formats or CAD generated stencils as for some reason when those drawings get translated, they are done so as nodes rather than curves.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
Again when it comes to custom metal stencils, we prefer to use stainless steel as it isn’t as prone to rusting as iron or just regular steel, the advantage of metal is that it can last A VERY LONG TIME and it’s incredibly easy to clean.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
When it comes to shapes for your stencils, it can literally be anything, you want acrylic unicorns? No problem. You want trees? No problem… and so forth, CNCROi.com also has an extensive shapes library (go to buy online in the top navigation) to give you ideas and videos as to what we can make.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
When it come to thin material like card stock or paper, CNCROi.com can get incredible resolution as the dwell time with our laser is very small, so things come out sharper, that’s why thin polycarbonate works great for many stencil applications.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
Polycarbonate is a wonderful material for custom stencils, it’s incredibly strong but most importantly, you can SEE THROUGH IT, as such, precise positioning is very easy using registration points in the design also works well.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
Stencils may be incredibly complex or very simple, from experience though, the more complex the design our customers send to us, the more issues their stencil may have simply due to conflicts in lines and other parameters that don’t come into play with more simple designs.
For instance, there is very little lines in a drawing making-up the letter “I” but there is a lot more in the letter “M”, a graphic designer may treat both the same, which is fine, but sometimes font spacing and other issues pop-up with our programming at our end at CNCROi.com that need to be resolved and it takes longer to fix an “M” than an “I”.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
For bigger production runs where there are different designs involved, don’t hide your reference or other lines, unify your layers and delete what’s not needed as these are the cause of many issues when it comes to making a custom stencil.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
If you want custom stencils made out of plywood, hardwood, softwood, veneer or even MDF, we can make them for you in high quality regardless of the quantity you need them made in.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
A mix of straight lines, curves, sharp corners and so forth really make no difference to us when we are making custom stencils, as such, you don’t need to dumb down your design as we’ve yet had an issue even with the most complex of stencils involving multiple fonts and styles.
One thing to keep in mind though is to outline your fonts and also send us the fonts, if you used any, in your custom stencil design, font related problems are the number one issue that pop-up when making amazing stencils for our customers.
CNCROi.com: The Stencil Maker
We always send a digital proof of the stencil before we cut it, be sure to review it very carefully and make sure what you see (and don’t see) are what you want in your finished physical stencil.
Need a custom stencil? Contact CNCROi.com right now!