Stencil Material Options: Plastics, Woods & Metals

Custom stencil material options are as endless as what designs CNCROi.com could fabricate on your behalf using a stencil.

Just to give you an idea of what CNCROi.com can “start with” regarding reference imagery, here’s a Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus) I designed years ago and put together, I did this with both my CNC router and many years later, my CNC laser.

What, you want proof? Here’s a custom CNC time machine in action!

And laser…

Now that we have that out-of-the-way, I took the above picture in my old “starter” shop where CNCROi.com was first founded and isolated the Apatosaurus and from that outline, made a really cool custom stencil using MDF.

The results are spectacular, so if you have any doubt as to what reference material we can use to make your stencil from, whether it’s producing a 3D animation and model…

Then taking a photo then buying machines and materials then cutting it out… my guess is whatever process you come-up with will be better streamline than mine was.

Luckily when it comes to custom stencil material options, most of the time it’s a thin MDF or even thinner plastic, rarely has CNCROi.com had to resort to very thick material like half-inch Corian or thicker metal that weighs a lot and causes the mailman back pain.

A very light material wonderful for one-time use, or a few depending on how thick you lay the spray paint, is cardboard, its cheap base material and quickly CNC laser cut by our Austrian wide-format industrial CNC laser.

CNCROi.com gets the same level of detail and precision from regular cardboard as we do with more expensive materials like polycarbonate or even mylar.

Cardboard can also be engraved, which comes in very handy when you have several panels that need to be put together for use with a custom stencil job, something not as easily accomplished as plastics.

By contrast, take a look what you can do with a metal stencil, like fire branding, that isn’t possible using only cardboard.

Another of the popular custom stencil material options is plywood, there are many different grades of plywood, from the very cheap and rough stuff we use a lot of here in the shop to the expensive solid wood veneer plywood that we use for our customers.

Plywood, hard of softwood, regardless of the numbers of plies, works great with our industrial wide-format CNC laser.

Unlike MDF or cardboard, plywood has a bit more durability and strength to it and it’s great for custom stencils required for parking lot asphalt or cement branding.

What does CNCROi.com do with the scraps from our custom wooden based stencils? They go to the fire pit.

The above stencil was made with the cheap stuff while the one below is a higher grade plywood with less voids and a more consistent density.

There are a lot of advantages to having CNCROi.com make a custom metal stencil for you, it’s dramatically stronger than any other option out there for the thickness to weight ratio it offers.

Our laser has plenty of clearance when it comes to cutting out custom stencils, across a variety of materials and grades of wood.

Here are the results from a plywood stencil, all the letters are solid and very well cut out by CNCROi.com.

Here is a comparison of the two different grades of plywood we cut, they are identical in every way, the only difference is the thickness and grade of the wood used to manufacture them.

To help differentiate them further, I decided to switch-out the two grades of plywood to give you an idea of how easily it is to make a custom sign with a mix of materials.

Here’s a close-up of these custom plywood stencils, of course, for actual use, the inside parts would be removed but for signage applications, everything is kept and easily interchanged.

Next up are plastics, thick acrylic to thin polycarbonate, CNCROi.com has made them all.

As a directly comparison, here’s extremely thin polycarbonate stencil production, it’s about the thickness of a piece of paper while the acrylic with the owls stencil is about the thickness of two credit cards on one another.

What’s cool about a transparent material is that you can see the fire formed underneath by instantly burning and vaporizing plastic.

The advantage with polycarbonate stencils is that they are incredibly durable and they have some flexibility to them unlike acrylic stencils which are hard and brittle.

Thickness wise, acrylic is more cost-effective if you need something more hefty and it holds-up better on flat surfaces that are themselves dead flat.

This is why CNCROi.com offers a variety of custom acrylic material options, as no one material suits all applications an needs by our customers.

CNCROi.com can also offer mix and match services, meaning we use the stencil (this time metal) as a front to a custom wooden sign that isn’t a stencil, thus producing the contrast you want for custom signage.

These owl stencils for instance, they will be used by a teacher for a painting class, they don’t need polycarbonate as it’s too thin and hard to work with for smaller unexperienced hands, these can be just held-up easily in any classroom setting.

Regardless of the custom stencil material options you go ahead with for CNCROi.com to make the stencils for you, the repeatability and precision of our equipment is the same, whether it’s waterjet cut metal or CNC routed thick polycarbonate or Corian.

Having a custom stencil made is a fun process, I really enjoy both making them and when customers show me the results of the work they do using our custom stencils.

What are the custom stencil material options available to you via CNCROi.com? Anything you want!