https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cloFGjEKMQE/

There is a surprising amount of equipment and expertise that’s required to pull off making quality custom wood coins using hardwoods, the first step is using kiln dried hardwoods, if it isn’t kiln dried, then it can (will) have bugs in it and the coins can warp pretty severely as they lose moisture because they are relatively thin.

Afterwards, the next step is making it into strips – I skipped quite a few steps because I had this batch of poplar and oak in the shop already, it’s pieces that were too small or thin to be used for SandboxRanch.com custom banks – so I kept them and they are being repurposed to make custom wood coins out of them!

Once I have the desired thickness, in this case, just a little thicker than 1/8″ thick, then it’s time to load them up in the laser and start the laser engraving and cutting process to transform strips of hardwood into custom wood coins.

Although there are a variety of tools in the shop that can actually do this, from 3D carving using one of our CNC routers to other laser sources, our main laser does a wonderful job of making the engravings necessary at the quality I expect for these custom wood coins.

Novelty coins, poker chips or whatever else you want made by SandboxRanch.com, just contact us and we’ll make it.

After the laser engraving process is finished on one side, it’s time to flip them around once cut, and engrave the other side – so making double sided coins, even just with the laser, is a multi-step process alone.

As you can see, essentially each and every custom wood coins is made one at a time, as such, SandboxRanch.com is able to batch these out, making different sizes and design spec coins at the same time using the same hardwood (within reason).

This is why we can offer you totally custom coins and even engrave each of them differently, including shape and other design features, essentially across one production run for SandboxRanch.com – a capability and availability that was very much reserved for our corporate clients over at CNCROi.com for years!

The very same level of customization and uniqueness that SandboxRanch.com brings to the world of custom wooden banks, is now brought to the coin world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXyLN8zJkN4/

In this case, these custom wood coins are actually the first “coin” that customers will receive with their custom banks made at SandboxRanch.com – it’s just a token to get the ball rolling, and the reason I’m offering them on this site as well is because maybe you want something extra special to give in the bank with your own design features as well.

For this production run, it’s two sets of custom wood coins with SandboxRanch.com branding, the bigger ones, in both poplar and oak, are 1.5″ in diameter while the smaller ones are half that, and just like our custom wooden banks made from the same material, the sizing is proportional.

You can see a close-up of the quality that we are able to achieve regardless of the hardwood we are using for this batch of custom wood coins.

Coins of all sizes, shapes, makes and models are available right now at SandboxRanch.com.

The nice thing about custom wooden coins is that they are very unique, meaning, there aren’t many in circulation in general and if you opt for your own branding and logos etc. on them, the uniqueness factor of the custom wood coins goes up exponentially!

After laser engraving and cutting one side of the custom wood coins, it’s time to make a quick jig using MDF that I can then put the coins into to engrave the backside, sadly, two sided lasers aren’t a thing yet so this is the only way to accomplish this in the shop.

You may be wondering, why laser engraving these custom wood coins is better than printing, which would be a lot faster!

If you want custom wooden coins made out of other wood species such as cherry, walnut, zebrawood or whatever, let us know and we can make them just as easily for you.

Unlike any printing method that uses paints, inks or dyes, laser engraving is just vaporizing material and creating a bottom layer of charcoal, as such, there is nothing to fade, crack or peel over time, these custom wood coins are not only incredibly durable but also the branding on them is long lasting!

Like the front, these custom wood coins are laser engraved to perfection on the backside using the same settings and process.

Each custom wood coins is unique, the texture, grain pattern and color variation is all it’s own, unlike metal coins in circulation.

Custom coins can have endless branding options, thanks to our approach towards mass custom production.

After one batch of custom wood coins was made for SandboxRanch.com promotional purposes, it was time to make the next one in quick succession.

After a little sanding, you can see the results of the custom wood coins production below, there is no plywood or veneer involved with these kiln dried hardwood coins, only solid and pure natural wood, with the ones on the right having a layer of tung oil applied to make the grain and contrast from the charcoal pop a bit more.

Making custom wood coins is fun and easy when you have the right equipment, and I’m very happy to finally offer this to SandboxRanch.com customers as well!

Want some custom wood coins? Visit our online store and of course, we can produce these in larger quantities and different design specs that you may want.

The post Custom Wood Coins: New Production Launch appeared first on SandboxRanch.com.

As you saw, I also further diversified our shapes offering with a dinosaur, will be adding a lot more shapes once I’m done the rounded alphabet designs at SandboxRanch.com.

What you see in these pictures is a machine I no longer have at SandboxRanch.com, my goal after getting my Thermwood CNC router was to offload my ShopBot PRSAlpha, wonderful machine, but has now left the shop for a new home, making cabinetry for a new owner.

I’ve been with my ShopBot PRSAlpha for many years, it has served me very well, and its what I used to make the first round of custom banks and launch SandboxRanch.com into what it is today – I just needed too many upgrades to make it worthwhile for me, so moving to an industrial platform was the only way forward production wise for my business.

Many of the processes that I use to this day, were established on the PRSAlpha CNC router by Shopbot, the Thermwood just does it faster – in the above picture, I’m creating flat and parallel stick so of red oak so that I can then glue them edge to edge to create the laminated slab which will then become custom birthday banks.

I don’t really care about the surface top and bottom of the wood because this will be cleaned-up with my router anyways before making the hardwood banks, as a result, as long as I have two clean parallel edges, the glue works just fine, essentially, I’m using my CNC machine as a jointer at SandboxRanch.com.

From custom acrylic colors to endless engraving options and even paint filling, we are offering complete customization of these banks to suit just about any desire, custom shapes through sizing even!

I’ve been slowly migrating production of the custom birthday banks over to the Thermwood, it has a rigid structure and a tool changer, making production way easier and more efficient.

After flattening both sides, yet again, after the glue-up, the next step is to begin making custom red oak banks at SandboxRanch.com.

You can already see that things are looking rather rough, I wasn’t sure what was going on but a few things seemed off when I was making this round of rounded custom birthday banks.

Somewhere very early in the production of these banks, the tips of the router bit sheered off by about 1/16″ on both sides, which means that basically, I was 1/8″ “off” everywhere the tip of the finishing bit did its work, and this is the most important part of the bit for making these hardwood banks.

As a result of this bit chipping, without any clear reason as to why it happened, what I produced out of the red oak wasn’t saleable, I was able to fix-up a few of them so it wasn’t a total loss, but it’s frustrating regardless to go through all this work to produce a bunch of banks just to essentially make scrap out of it.

I’ve made a ton of red oak banks at SandboxRanch.com, so the next step is to further diversity into wood species, hardwood to start, as it makes things fun at the shop, diversity is an enjoyable thing when it comes to woodworking.

You can see below the symptom of the problem, these I was able to fix-up during production but the rest were no good, this has to be manually sanded, which is a step I can’t really do in full production as I have a lot of banks to make and sanding takes way too much time to do properly.

No problem though, I have some hardwood poplar in the shop and I decided that we’ll make another round of custom birthday banks using this material at SandboxRanch.com!

I started with red oak because it’s a very hard hardwood, this is a softer hardwood, but keep in mind, as mentioned in the video, there is some deviation in hardwood densities, meaning some red oak sections can be as soft as poplar and some sections of poplar can be as hard as red oak.

After cutting down the kiln dried poplar lumber, the next step is to convert it into sticks that will then be glued together to form a slab that is then transformed into another batch of custom birthday banks at SandboxRanch.com.

No longer having the ShopBot PRSAlpha in the shop is a sad thing, it’s in a good home though, but this provides me with an opportunity for SPACE that I can better utilize, making production far more efficient, from using my chop saw to table saw to transform lumber into banks.

I can’t really screw things into the spoil board of my Thermwood as I could with my ShopBot, so that means creating a jig to hold the sticks together to flatten both sides and make them parallel, yes, welcome to my new 5ft  x 10 ft jointer!

Custom shapes is something I want to drastically increase the number of on the website, the reason being, literally any shape can be made as we are essentially making one bank at at time, what the actual bank is, makes no difference to our machinery.

As poplar is a light colored wood without a very strong grain pattern, it can be hard to see what was flattened and cleaned-up, so I’m using pencil lines in order to mark the surface and once they are all gone, I know that every surface is dead-flat for the custom birthday banks to be able to move forward.

I really love my new jig, it does a wonderful job of holding the wood in place while I clean-up all the surfaces to get it ready for glue, having exact flatness means you barely see the seams in the wood slab after glue has been applied, the joints are that tight and flush to one another!

As you saw with the red oak slab earlier I screwed-up on, the glue-up happens in much the same way, regardless of species, I like having big slabs to work from as it makes overall production more efficient to make a dozen at once rather than just a hand full when the time comes at SandboxRanch.com.

I generally let these dry for a few days, the glue that you see may dry overnight, but the glue inside that isn’t in contact with much of any air may need a little more time to settle, I want to make solid custom birthday banks, not banks that have gluing problems the moment I cut them out with my CNC router.

As you can see, there is quite a bit of woodworking involved with making these custom birthday banks at SandboxRanch.com before they are even produced, and that’s what makes it fun, each design mix applied to the finished slab is different as is the grain pattern on the finished banks we make.

After the glue has dried thoroughly, I stick the newly minted slab of poplar (in this case) onto my Thermwood CNC router, it will then proceed to flatten both sides and make them parallel, which means awesome custom birthday banks!

Each step of the way thus far, I’ve been making saw dust, so the original poplar hardwood has gotten shaved repeatedly on all sides, and the final step is almost upon us before we can proceed and make custom birthday banks.

We are now more than 6 months since my first attempt at making these custom hardwood banks, as you can see, many of the processes and even machinery has changed, I use to make all of these using only two bits, as I had to manually change them which is a pain, now I can mix and match four of them with more on the way.

Once the slab is flattened on one side, I flip it over, no longer requiring my jig, and begin flattening the other side, this will be the side that ultimately becomes the front of the custom birthday banks that SandboxRanch.com is making.

As part of my ever-increasing checklist of things to watch for, making a chamfer on all the edges reveals to me that my design is sound, and that everything will fit accordingly, if you look at earlier videos of me making custom hardwood banks, I didn’t have this step all the time and as a result, yep, made lots of scrap in the process.

After the design is sound, I can then go into full production, I’m currently limited to four bits to make each one of these custom birthday banks but I make the most out of it, you have the roughing bit, the finishing bit, the chamfering bit and the drill bit – having more would just make things go faster but the quality would be the same for SandboxRanch.com products.

The more I can fit on a finished laminated slab, the better use of the hardwood I get, so I try to squish as much as possible and as you’ll see when production is done, there is very little wasted at the end of the wood chipping day.

I’ve used poplar many times before, it’s a wonderful wood whose aesthetic fits perfectly with the rounded look and feel of these custom birthday banks, the grain is subtle, the color is more muted and the durability is still awesome for SandboxRanch.com customers!

You can see immediately that the finish on these custom birthday banks is a lot cleaner than on their screwed-up red oak cousins, I replaced the bit with a fresh one and threw-out the chipped one, still have no idea what the other one hit but we’ve certainly moved on since then at SandboxRanch.com.

Having custom options is important, and my goal with this business it to bring a little custom to everybody’s lives, banking is only the start but an important one to achieve this milestone globally.

Periodically, you saw in the video, me vacuuming the surface of the production area, the reason for this are those little pieces of stray hardwood that can be flung across the shop if they get hit the right way by our CNC router, though this possibility has lessened quite a bit with the dust hood.

You can see now in the photo below the drilling bit I use to make the holes in the banks, I use to do this with a regular drill and wow, this is so much easier and consistent, and the holes match perfectly the holes made into the acrylic from our CNC laser, so the entire assembly process is dramatically more efficient at SandboxRanch.com.

After the drill has done its magic, it’s time to move onto the rouging and finishing bit once more, that’s where having a tool changer really comes in handy, because I don’t have to re-do the Z-axis zeroing each time and go through the process of manually changing them between each process of transforming this slab of poplar into custom birthday banks.

Below is what you see straight off the machine, a few splinters and wayward pieces of wood that need to be cleaned-up but overall, these are almost ship ready right off the machine, a process that has taken MONTHS to achieve on both the machine and design front at SandboxRanch.com.

There are endless possibilities when it comes to your own hardwood bank, if there is a shape or letter that you don’t see that you’d like on our website, contact us to turn that wish into reality.

Next step to streamline at the shop will be what you see below, the jigsaw is a good tool, but not optimal for cutting out these banks, as a result, a bandsaw is in my very near future, a big one, that can handle big slabs of wood like this with ease.

You can see the small ledge I leave on all the bank in the image below, after cutting out the various letter and shape banks using the jigsaw, I have to move to another tool in the shop, the table router, in order to remove this and make the hardwood poplar banks full again.

You can see below, the small amount of scrap that’s left over after making all these banks, it’s almost nothing!

Each process of making these custom birthday banks removes material, each surface by the time I’m done, has been touched in some manner, and this is the process that has taken a very long time to optimize to produce the best possible banks possible at SandboxRanch.com.

After the solid body of all these custom birthday banks is complete, the next step is making the fronts, as these designs are “new”, I test out the fronts using MDF to make sure fit, form and function are correct, it’s cheaper to use scrap MDF in the shop than expensive acrylic for this test.

You can see in the image above how the MDF corresponds to the custom birthday banks below, the next step is optimizing the design further and then making the acrylic fronts on all of them.

SandboxRanch.com offers transparent acrylic by default, but as you see on our website, that can also be customized in color and engraving, every aspect of these custom birthday banks is customizable by the customer.

In this batch, a few of these banks had to leave the shop before I had a chance to do the video, but below you can see what the engraving of acrylic looks like when complete (but still dirty before cleanup) at SandboxRanch.com.

Need custom products? Contact SandboxRanch.com and we’ll make it for you!

The post Custom Birthday Banks: Red Oak Screw-Ups & Poplar Hardwoods appeared first on SandboxRanch.com.

You can actually see the first set of round letter banks in the very first video I made for SandboxRanch.com before it came into being below, notice the S, L, C, J and L? Well, yes, all scrap for many many reasons but it was a very valuable lesson so it was by no means an absolute loss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYlrz6dMwKk/

Now that I have a working and repeatable process established with the square letter banks, going back to the rounded letter banks is a breeze, there are so many issues that just no longer exist thanks to heavy investments in time and treasure.

Like everything else bank related at SandboxRanch.com, custom rounded letter banks begin life as laminated red oak boards which I make from rough sawed lumber, this adds strength and rigidity to the banks that are about to be made, which means more durability for the end-products we make with it.

There are MANY steps involved with making custom rounded letter banks, both before and after they are made at the shop on-demand, from getting the laminated slab ready to go with cleaning on both sides before the first bank is ever made to the finishing and window added to the front before shipping these out.

Now that I have my feeds and speeds dialed in for production of these custom rounded letter banks, all sorted out when I made their square variant, I can pretty much mix and match any bank on SandboxRanch.com to make them at the same time, whether they are a letter bank or a shape, another area I want to expand upon greatly in the coming years.

Here’s just a glimpse of what’s possible, a lot of show and tell!

For this specific production run, I wanted to see and hear the process of making the custom rounded letter banks, that’s how you tell if you are going too fast, slow or there are some issues with production that aren’t apparent when you have the music blaring on max and lots of other activities going on at the shop.

As the front part of the dust boot is missing, lots of chips escape, essentially, I’m removing more than half of the laminated slab I made as chips during the production of these custom rounded letter banks, and when that doesn’t end-up getting sucked out, it ends-up on the table, piles of it, all over the place at SandboxRanch.com.

Banks have been my interest for years, it started with a little loon I got when I was a kid and has evolved a lot since then now that I can make them myself.

Luckily, I have another vacuum system that I used throughout the production process to clean-up the chips that were being produced during the making of the custom rounded letter banks, so you don’t have photos and videos of just a pile of wood chips building up higher and higher until the whole job is complete.

Of course, I also made myself a loon, similar to what I had when I was a child and very much the inspiration for me getting into the custom wood banking business to begin with, way back when I was a child and going to school required going uphill both ways by foot through frozen snow.

What I really enjoy most about making this run of custom rounded letter banks is that I’m no longer producing scrap after scrap, basically, everything I make now, thanks to months and months of working out the kinks, is almost perfect right off the machine!

It still blows me away at how effortless my new CNC machine makes these banks, there are so many curves highly detailed areas where I’m carving in a very challenging wood and I’m able to do it at SandboxRanch.com as if I was cutting air with this beast of a machine.

As you review some of these older videos, you can start to see just how much has changed since I started making these banks earlier in the year.

The final step right before cutting out the outlines of these custom rounded letter banks is drilling all the holes for the screws, this alone took a very long time to sort out properly, and to think, I use to manually drill these all out myself one by one using a power drill.

After all the custom rounded letter banks are cut out, of course, I have some square letter banks and the loon in there with a square prototype, its time to get the jigsaw out and finish the cutting out process at SandboxRanch.com.

The jigsaw does an OK job of cutting out the various elements for these custom banks but I really need to make space for a proper band saw, and a big band saw at that, to make this aspect of the job a lot safer and more enjoyable.

After I employ the jigsaw on these custom rounded letter banks, the next step is routing them on my router table and then after that, making the matching front windows for all these banks.

The most enjoyable part of making all these banks is the diversity, I’m not just making the same thing each and every time, even if the letters are shapes are the same, they are all unique like a fingerprint, with their own color variations, textures and wood grain.

With every “new shape”, whether letter or animal, I always make a MDF prototype first, just to make sure all the endless design work performed previously is accurate within about 1/16″ so the screws fit in properly and the outline is beautiful.

There was a lot of testing between CNC machines, power tools and process in order to get SandboxRanch.com to this point, but all that hard work was well worth it, the quality right out of the machine is amazing, you can see below, this is straight out before any very fine tuning is performed.

Once the MDF checks out, then it’s time to cut out the custom rounded letter bank windows, this batch all called for clear acrylic, so that’s what I cut except for one square letter bank, which was a transparent blue.

Below is what this run of custom banks looks like with the still protective masking on the various acrylics used, if you have a very keen eye, you’ll notice none of the “C”s made it to this step yet, that’s because I screwed-up the design file and thus, made a C rounded letter bank that didn’t meet my specs.

Need custom letter banks or shaped banks? Contact us!

The post Custom Rounded Letter Banks appeared first on SandboxRanch.com.

You can actually see my very first production (prototype?) run at SandboxRanch.com in the video below, that’s when I learned that I have A LOT MORE TO LEARN before being able to produce quality custom shaped banks and more importantly, repeatable results that were ship-ready from the machine.

If you notice closely, very little of what I did in this first run six months ago was actually done in the last one, there has been an incredible evolution in workflow and process start to finish, with the most important stuff like software optimizing, happening off-screen.

The biggest change to the shop and production of these (in this case) custom shaped banks is the huge 12 000 pound CNC router I got to help make these banks as perfect as possible right off the machine, the less work I have to do before and after the making of these banks, the better it is regarding making A LOT of them in short order for SandboxRanch.com customers.

I’ve found chamfering is a very popular option for the banks we make, it helps break the edge so that it isn’t sharp and best of all, gives me a reference on the laminated red oak to make sure my positioning is accurate when it comes to making them.

Having a tool changer has allowed me an incredible amount of flexibility when it comes to making these custom shaped banks especially, so much so, that one of the upgrades I’ll do in the future is adding more tooling options as I want to further customize the production of these banks with more neat options for SandboxRanch.com customers.

For this run, a few different custom shaped banks were made, a helicopter bank, heart bank, tractor bank, elephant bank, pig bank, f22 bank and a submarine bank.

You will notice that in addition to the wine bottle bank that there was also a beer bank in the mix, but I forgot to make the bottom flat in the design, so that will rock, thus hitting back the design file to make an update to redo that one in the future properly.

There are so many ways to make these custom shaped banks at SandboxRanch.com, literally anything can be made into a bank, animal, sketch, photograph… it never ends, and that’s where the fun begins!

For these custom shaped banks, the goal was to prototype that all the design lessons I learned during the initial square letter banks can be applied to them, it took months of these lessons to get things down to the point where all of these custom shaped banks worked out great right off the bat, except the beer mug, due to an oversight.

I feel like the journey has really just begun for SandboxRanch.com, there is so much to do now that most of the heavy work is behind me, and all our customers can benefit greatly from this.

It’s so nice having all the headaches and problems sorted out now to the point where whatever can be imagined can be made into a custom shaped bank, not just for kids but adults and corporate events or fundraisers at SandboxRanch.com.

You can see the chips are also looking perfect, this means that the custom bits used to make these custom red oak banks don’t have the massive scotching marks that the initial run did, the cuts are smooth and the results are always fabulous.

There are MANY steps involved with making these custom shaped banks, having access to four tools on the tool changer makes a huge difference and I could always use more, but for everything I produce currently at SandboxRanch.com, this is more than adequate.

Other good news is that I’ve got my laminate gluing technique, from a lot of practice, to the point that the banks are thicker, there is no point in making a custom shaped bank that falls apart for SandboxRanch.com customers because it’s too fragile!

Each step of the production process at SandboxRanch.com when it comes to making these custom shaped banks has been tested repeatedly and continues to be incrementally improved upon run after run.

Now that the CNC router end of things is finished for these custom shaped banks, the next step is cutting them out and then proceeding to the finishing options, including the window cutting and placement.

This has become quite a fun business to run, for once in my life, I can optimize designs and processes continuously, which is something that’s not possible when doing custom fabrication all day at CNCROi.com.

Each and every bank produced at SandboxRanch.com follows roughly these same steps, the shape might be different, the letter a different size, but the steps required to produce a finished product remain the same.

You can see how great these custom shaped banks are looking, they are each and every one, very unique, different wood grain patterns and directions but regardless, the quality of the build is there for each one.

As these are “new” shapes for SandboxRanch.com, I test out the window placement along with other specs using MDF to make sure that everything fits as it should, cost-effectively.

After the MDF checks out, it’s time to make them out of acrylic, which is something that we have greatly invested in to tighten up the supply and quality train of at SandboxRanch.com.

These custom shaped banks are almost done, the acrylic is the last piece of the puzzle that must be complete before these are ready to be shipped out to the customer.

And here are the finished banks in this production run, everything is looking amazing, I’m so proud of all the work I’ve done over the past six months to get to this point with SandboxRanch.com, from developing the website to the actual items on sale there.

On the acrylic front, here are the colors currently available, it’s hard to take a good photo of these so here they are at various angles and backgrounds to help you decide which you want for your custom shaped banks.

Polycarbonate (bullet proof glass) is the same as clear acrylic but the etching is black, and they are dramatically stronger.

Need custom shaped banks? Buy them now at SandboxRanch.com.

The post Custom Shaped Banks: Banking Journey Begins! appeared first on SandboxRanch.com.

There are quite a few steps involved, from purchasing rough sawed red oak lumber from the mill to making beautiful finished custom wood piggy banks, a variety of tooling is required from manual clamps with glue to power tools to multiple CNC platforms!

My goal with SandboxRanch.com was to make on-demand affordable wooden projects that were completely customizable, and that requires quite a bit of investment from tools to material suppliers to pull off correctly… it’s been over 6 months from seriously going ahead with this idea and actually getting things to the stage you see them now.

After the cutting of the rough sawed red oak and the glue-up, I end-up with a wonderful slab as you see above, only after all that previous work, can I start to do the router work required to transform this into custom wood piggy banks for customers across North America at SandboxRanch.com.

I’ve been designing banks for years, even before I even knew what CNC machines were, here’s a 3d animation of a design I came-up with about eons ago.

This CNC router is very special, so special in fact, that they no longer make it… what makes it so great? The gantry is super rigid because it doesn’t move, the table under the work is what moves, this means there aren’t any motors required to move the gantry, which means it can be super heavy and rigid, which all comes together to produce a fantastic finished result right off the machine.

The very first thing that our router does, after flattening both sides, is making the chamfering on all the edges of the banks that require it, I want to work my way into the bank, removing material as I delve deeper into it, this makes sure nothing moves on me as only vacuum suction is holding it down at the moment.

I generally run a test on one custom wood piggy bank before doing the rest, there are quite a lot of programming changes done after each production run as I hone my skills on producing the absolute best result possible for SandboxRanch.com customers, and this needs continual cycles of improvement and verification between each production run.

It’s incredible how much things have changed from the first concept of developing these custom wood piggy banks… it’s been quite a journey!

What the router is doing here is carving out all the insides of the custom wood piggy banks, the finish from this process is actually pretty good, but as with everything else, tweaking can improve things further.

The chip load is about perfect, the machine is very happy cutting through this very hard laminated red oak slab and it’s great to see, after all the work done previously, a finished product slowly emerging from all the sawdust and noise made throughout this process, making the final custom wood piggy banks.

Although making these custom wood piggy banks would be totally possible using just hand and power tools, I can’t imagine making thousands of these in that way, the repetition would be crazy and of course, any type of customization would greatly increase the time and costs involved with turning these banks into reality.

Now that the insides of all these custom wood piggy banks is almost done being roughed out, the next step along the chain is to switch bits (tool changers are awesome!) and using a finishing bit, going over every aspect of the bank to make things nice and clean, inside and out at SandboxRanch.com.

Here’s another banking concept I had years ago as well, this one could be easily adapted of course to the new processes developed with SandboxRanch.com‘s red oak piggy banks.

My shop may be small, but what it can produce is volume and quality is astounding – it’s the synergy between various CNC platforms that makes what would require a massive shop into what can be made using a little one.

The finishing bit is now carving out the ledges all around the inner perimeter of the custom wood piggy banks, this is where the acrylic front will settle into, of course, that is CNC laser cut, so one CNC is helping another to complete one product.

In the above picture, you can see how the holes are drilled into the banks, the same process is also done on the matching acrylic or polycarbonate with the laser, which means that all I need to do is screw in the requested type for the customer of the custom wood piggy bank and it’s ready to ship after finishing!

What I really enjoy about making these custom wood piggy banks is that each is very much unique, from the engraving to the finishing, there is an incredible diversity in what we can produce at SandboxRanch.com and offering them to customers however they want is great fun!

There is no other way to learn how to make quality custom wooden piggy banks than to do it, and it cost a lot of time and money to get to this point, I’m so happy I went through all of that to get to this point, it’s very rewarding to see where this began to where it’s going.

After all these steps are done, the final one is using the roughing bit yet again to carve out the perimeter of the custom wood piggy banks then using the finishing bit to do the same process but nicer, before all the banks can finally be cut out of the red oak at SandboxRanch.com.

I’d say that quite easily, half of the laminated wood that I spent so much time making ends-up being saw dust, the nice thing about hardwood saw dust is that it has some weight to it and thus, settles down pretty easily on the bed of the router rather than go airborne.

This production run of custom wood piggy banks is looking great, each time I make these, I get better results, faster, and with less problems that need solving!

Nesting these custom wood piggy banks is vital, I want to waste as little wood as possible and utilize as much of the laminated red oak as possible, so jigging things around for that perfect fit takes a bit of time but well worth it if I can produce just one more bank out of the slab.

Literally anything can be transformed into a custom bank, 2D objects to carved 3D all work great for this application, it’s just a question of time and getting things sorted so the possible volumes that could be coming in are possible to be produced in a timely manner.

The only part of this that isn’t fun at the moment is cutting them all out with the jigsaw, that’s a process that I will be refining further later in the year using a big bandsaw, that will solve one more pain point when making these custom wood piggy banks, again, slow but continual progress is essential to keep production going on these banks!

After the jigsaw did its work, it’s time for the routering out of all the ledges, this I don’t mind, I actually find it quite fun, but that can be improved upon like anything else, with experience and further investments in better equipment and processes at SandboxRanch.com.

Here’s what this latest batch of custom wood piggy banks looks like, just like this, without the finishing, they really look amazing… finishing just gives them a bit more pop while creating a barrier from the environment regarding humidity other issues present with natural wood.

Of course, we aren’t limited to only the alphabet at SandboxRanch.com, custom trays and whatever else can be just as easily produced for you on demand and to order.

Like everything else in the shop, I make due with what works until I figure out a better system, right now, this process below for adding tung oil and letting things dry works fine, but as you can see, it doesn’t scale very well so I already have plans to make something far larger and flexible in the very near future regarding this aspect of custom wood piggy bank finishing.

While the custom banks dry, the acrylic fronts can be cut out, yet again, a process that can be further optimized and refined but it’s certainly getting there at SandboxRanch.com.

Simon, my son, gets an extra special 12″ tall custom wood piggy bank, using blue transparent acrylic with his name engraved on the front, he doesn’t know his name yet but this is a good reminder!

I’m very proud of how this batch came-out, you can see the diversity of paint fills, names and alphabet possibilities that SandboxRanch.com offers you… and a lot more is coming in the pipeline!

Want something custom? Visit SandboxRanch.com right now!

The post Custom Wood Piggy Banks: Start to Finish appeared first on SandboxRanch.com.

As with our custom letter banks, these custom animal paw trays are made from rough sawed red oak lumber, which we then cut to size, laminate, flatten and then go right into production.

Now that I have my super rigid CNC router up and running, I can make things that would otherwise have been a lot of trouble, and effortlessly switch bits to make a higher quality end-product for customers far and wide looking for unique gifts and personalized items from SandboxRanch.com.

Rough sawed lumber is first cut in half and then transformed into strips that are then further flattened, laminated and then flattened again before being transformed into finished (in this case) custom animal paw trays.

As the steps involved for this project are the same as the banks, and that’s on purpose, it means we can mass-customize and personalize a host of different products at the same time, these cost efficiencies directly benefit you, our customer, because we aren’t stuck making separate production runs between different items as the general wood species and thicknesses are shared between items.

I like documenting my work, it shows me how much things have advanced through the months and years, production runs get bigger, efficiencies get more so and the fun just keeps on growing throughout!

I’ve grown to rather enjoy the overall process of producing laminated boards at SandboxRanch.com, it’s actually quite fun transforming wood that most people wouldn’t give a second look to into items that are not just beautiful but highly functional in a variety of settings and applications.

The marks you see on the red oak strips is actually caused by my little table saw, which I plan to upgrade shortly, it’s like my Shopbot that you see working right now, fantastic for 95% of what we do at the shop, but that 5% is the area which I’m focused on improving over the next year or two as I move my equipment from very good to full-on industrial quality.

After the flatting process, you can see how beautiful the red oak looks, after glue-up and compression, the transformation is complete.

You can see how the steps are very similar to the last production run of custom red oak banks for SandboxRanch.com.

I flatten three sides of the red oak laminated boards, this products the best results for the glue-up consistency wise, of course, after glue, all of this needs to be flattened yet again on both sides, so I’m am chewing through a lot of wood at SandboxRanch.com to produce these laminated slabs of red oak, but the results are well worth it.

For this production run, I was making many laminated boards, as such, it’s was a rinse and repeat to produce these, as I’m still transitioning from my old CNC router to the new one, that’s why you see both in the video and photos, but soon it will all be Thermwood.

For these little animal paw tray, my goal, like the banks, was to offer a unique product that was cost-effective, can be endlessly customizable, and is both useful and aesthetically pleasing.

It might seem like there is a lot of work in the physical world to make these animal paw trays, but there is even more in the design aspect, to make sure I can make something for customers that doesn’t cost a fortune and where I can gain efficiencies of scale for SandboxRanch.com products.

States always make for great trays, yet again, a whole line of these are coming soon… it’s amazing what we can produce at SandboxRanch.com.

This was glue-up number two of many more to come, I lost count of how many I did in this run but I find doing the first half of all these jobs, making the custom laminated slab, works best doing the one after the other rather than just when I need to make custom banks and trays for SandboxRanch.com.

The glue needs a minimum of 24 hours to dry but I generally give it a lot more than that, there is no harm in having these glued-up longer than necessary before carving them out at SandboxRanch.com to become custom products but there is harm if I didn’t allow for proper bonding of the laminated strips.

Here’s the third board of laminated red oak that I glued-up, you can see the top looks rough, this doesn’t matter as the bottom and two sides of these pickets are what matters, this will be flattened yet again by the router and as a result, made parallel and cleaned-up in one step.

Now for the second stage of production for these red oak custom animal paw trays, actually cutting them out at SandboxRanch.com.

Shooter trays are another item that will be coming to SandboxRanch.com soon, but don’t let you not seeing it available yet on the site dissuade you from contacting us with your design and allowing us the opportunity to make it before they are officially online.

After flattening the board, removing the dried glue and the rough surface on the top as you saw earlier, the trays are cut in quick succession, as I’m new to many aspects of this using the Thermwood, I forgot to orientate the board properly so I was cutting is wide rather than long.

You can see on the picture below that there is a half-tray to the far right, not a big deal, once I saw the mistake, I fixed-up the design file and was able to move the animal pay trays that would have been junk to the space that would have been empty at the end of the laminated board at SandboxRanch.com.

The reason one tray is already cut-out is because I wanted to test my program first, as this was the first time I was cutting this with my Thermwood, I wanted to double check speeds, feeds and tool changing before doing a production run to find-out I overlooked something important.

With a machine like this, it’s very easy to produce scrap if you don’t have all your ducks in a row, I learned a lot during this production run by the way, so each successive video will just be an improvement of lessons to increase productivity.

From cigar ash trays to pill trays, their production is all similar, just the design and materials are different.

Custom trays are something I’ve done a lot of at CNCROi.com but never to this level of upmost customization and quality right off the machine, having a tool changer is a game changer alone, a super rigid machine is yet another and all the experience from years of custom CNC woodworking are really paying dividends with this totally industrial CNC router.

What I especially like about what I’m producing with my Thermwood is the lack of sanding requirement, it’s a small thing, but having such a powerful machine with zero play gives a lot of benefits and that’s a major one.

The spindle is super-powerful, the bits are custom and wow does it show when this production run of custom animal paw trays that are now available for purchase at SandboxRanch.com.

Need custom trays of any size, shape or design? Contact SandboxRanch.com right now!

The post Red Oak Custom Animal Paw Trays appeared first on SandboxRanch.com.

That being said, this blog post is a bit of a transition as over the past 3 months, I’ve been slowly moving things to the Thermwood beast and using my Shopbot less and less throughout this time, hence not posting much on this website until the entire production was finally moved over, so some of these photos and videos are showing how things “were” done, not being done currently, at SandboxRanch.com.

Most of the limitations I had at SandboxRanch.com since inception has been my Shopbot, there is nothing wrong with this machine, it has served me incredibly well through the years, but for the speed and quality of production I was gunning for regarding these custom red oak banks specifically, I was just beyond the limit of what was possible with it.

Some jobs, such as flattening, the Shopbot is just as good as the Thermwood, this is a relatively simple task that doesn’t require much horsepower or rigidity in the overall machine, and I’ve done a ton of this type of work at my main business CNCROi.com through the years with phenomenal results.

Just to give you an idea of the evolution that SandboxRanch.com has experienced over the past three months, check-out the first video of me making custom banks to the video I’ve uploaded for this blog post.

The issues I was having with the ShopBot was that, by its very nature, it isn’t a rigid machine, or a heavy one at that, for 95% of the jobs I do at CNCROi.com, this poses absolutely no problem, but when it comes to making custom red oak banks, this became a glaring issue that I could only compensate so much for until I decided to “give-up” and look for my dream machine, the Thermwood.

The Thermwood now residing at SandboxRanch.com has  rigid frame and solid gantry, which means no design or weight compromises were required in order to create a moving gantry, instead, the table moves back and forth, which in itself seems like the same difference, but the table is super rigid and heavy on its own on a solid steel frame, so it can absorb vibrations endlessly without issue, as does the static gantry.

The other major improvement going from the ShopBot to the Thermwood was a tool changer, I plan on adding more tooling so I can have even more down the line, but not having to manually change tools any longer is a MASSIVE improvement on its own in speed and end-quality of these custom wooden banks throughout the production cycle.

With my Shopbot, having to change tools manually means you want to use and change tools as little as possible, so I limited myself to two tools, with my Thermwood, I use all four during production and can further optimize the selection, so instead of one tool change during production on the Shopbot, I now change tools 6 times between the four tools I use.

Another MASSIVE improvement has been the vacuum table, you’ll notice I don’t use screws or other wood pieces to hold down the “once flattened” red oak laminated board that these custom banks are cut from, the suction power of two massive vacuum pumps holds things perfectly in place.

This is the first preproduction of the banks I did, some were good, some were not, regardless, lots of work getting them ready for customers.

I only had to create a sled to hold the glue-up down for one side as it doesn’t lay flat enough to create enough suction to hold everything in place, a very minor inconvenience compared to the process of screwing and unscrewing boards around the red oak lamination.

In these photos and video, I’m still very green to the capabilities that Thermwood offers me now with SandboxRanch.com, there are already programming updates I’ve done for the next round of custom wooden banks and tooling to further streamline production, but at least now, I’m able to focus on speeding things up rather than down, as I had to do with my ShopBot PRSAlpha.

The Thermwood is about 12 000 pounds, so it’s significantly heavier than my Shopbot, so any vibration is greatly dampened and wow do you see those results in the end-product for SandboxRanch.com.

The spindle and related bit cut through red oak as if it was butter, the results are ship-ready right off the machine with only a little sanding here and there (this is real wood) before the finishing must be done.

So this has been the journey I’ve been on over the past 3 months and although it has been very expensive in time and treasure, I couldn’t ever see myself going back to the old ways of making SandboxRanch.com products, I don’t know how I achieve the very good results I did previously, but having a full-on industrial machine is night and day.

My last run, you saw many improvements throughout, and they are very much continuous for each run that I do, there is always a few tweeks that can be made to make production faster, better and at a higher quality overall for SandboxRanch.com products.

Going from my Shopbot to Thermwood also required me to upgrade the tooling, and during the testing through calibration phase, I wore out much of it, so these images look rougher than they really are now for SandboxRanch.com products.

You can see in the above photo through, just how clean and sharp all the custom wooden banks look straight off the machine, I spend so much time optimizing and sanding the results from the ShopBot, that looking at this, and how effortless the Thermwood made it to this point, this is really a thing of absolute beauty!

After the Thermwood finished cutting out this batch of custom banks, the next step was using a jigsaw to cut them out of the laminated wood followed by using my router table to cut the thin skin all the banks have, which holes them in place with the vacuum table, as a final step before finishing and final inspection.

After the CNC routering is done at SandboxRanch.com, the next step is to make their matching acrylic (in this case) front windows, you will notice in the above photo that the top “A” has holes all around, yep, I used the Thermwood to test-out pre-drilling all the holes in these custom wooden banks as well… with fabulous results!

Laser cutting out the acrylic has been the same since inception of SandboxRanch.com, I have an amazing machine for that process so there is no need for any upgrade or improvement at that end.

All the front windows are now cut, they are transparent, the green you see is the masking on both sides to keep it “clean” until the very last step of marrying the red oak to the acrylic using screws.

Here’s what the final results look like, absolutely astounding… BTW, this is absolutely not a rub against my ShopBot PRSAlpha, if it wasn’t for that machine in my shop through the years, my Thermwood wouldn’t exist, it’s an incredible machine that has served me incredibly well through the years and will continue to do so for its next owner.

Want custom wooden banks? Buy them online at SandboxRanch.com.

The post Thermwood Beast Activated! appeared first on SandboxRanch.com.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB5lXeYO73w/

There is continuous testing happening throughout the process as I further optimized tool pathing and work out better ways to produce these custom square letter banks for SandboxRanch.com.

As the previous batch, the first step is getting the kiln dried rough sawed red oak lumber and then chopping it down into strips, this entire process happens relatively quickly, regardless of what we produce at SandboxRanch.com, this step has remained pretty much unchanged from the very first batch of prototypes I made.

This hardwood is not only very hard but surprisingly strong, which is perfect for these custom square letter banks.

After cutting the lumber into slats, the nest step is to flatten and make it all parallel, this is probably the most important step in the whole process of making these custom square letter banks because if this is the only point in the entire process where a consistent material can be produced, meaning ultimate repeatability and quality can be generated for this product at SandboxRanch.com.

This is the step where having a large jointer would really help production because two of the three sides that I flatten on my CNC router aren’t actually the top and the bottom of the laminated red oak slab I’m making but where the glue joints will be, up to this point, this is where the most material is wasted as a result.

After flattening three sides (I need one flat side to go down on the clamps), then it’s time to glue everything up, the results from the CNC router are absolutely amazing in this regard, the joints are absolutely perfect, it’s just the process isn’t very efficient from several points of view at this point at SandboxRanch.com.

After the glue has dried, it’s time to yet again flatten both sides, this cleans off the run-off glue and creates the slab that will be ready to become many many custom square letter banks at SandboxRanch.com.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1zB5JNYk_w/

You can compare the changes in production from this run to the last, they are subtle but they are there.

In this case, I think the CNC is a better tool to accomplish this than any other power tool I could get at the shop, a wide belt sander could do it but I’d be flying through belts while the router does everything precisely and cleanly in one step.

Now, I just have to flip the newly formed and greatly strengthened red oak slab to flatten the other side and I can go right into production making some custom square letter banks.

No matter how hard the material is or the glue, my CNC router powers right through this without any problem, it’s quite amazing how much of a transformation that occurs up to this point from the rough sawed lumber to actually a very beautiful surface from which the custom square letter banks will be cut from.

What you are looking at here is probably the last time my ShopBot PRSAlpha will be cutting out these banks, I’ve bought a big industrial Thermwood that will be able to handle the requirements I have in both time and production quality that I’m having a heck of a time achieving with the ShopBot, so enjoy these photos as the next run will most likely be from a far bigger and exponentially more powerful CNC router machine.

The results are looking great, this entire journey to this point has taken many areas of investment, from developing my own shipping department to be able to process and ship these banks directly from the shop to custom router bits that really produce an AMAZING result and soon, a massive new router to compliment and finally put production quality to a whole new level at SandboxRanch.com.

So far the work involved with getting SandboxRanch.com off the ground has been quite monumental but it has benefited CNCROi.com in so many ways, this tangent has been a wonderful way to push forward new production methods and efficiencies shop wide… and it all started with wanting to make custom children’s banks out of wood myself in the shop with incredible customization capabilities.

With the new CNC router I’m getting, I’ll also have a 7 tool changer capability, which means I’m not limited to just two anymore, this means I can not only be a lot more efficient in production quality but also add features that I’ve been wanting to but was really unable to up to this point as the production times and efficiencies were borderline criminal in how much they negatively affected things.

Many of the steps you see happening here for the production of these custom square letter banks will not change, the process will just be faster, at a higher quality and will include some aspects of production that I simply cannot do well with my current equipment but is no problem with the new equipment coming to CNCROi.com very very soon!

SandboxRanch.com has been optimizing and improving on these custom square banks for quite a while now, we are almost there!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQybRyVXS1Q/

There is quite a bit of work involved with both power tools, hand tools and CNC machines to produce the final custom square letter banks, it’s very much a labor of love at SandboxRanch.com and I can’t wait to finally have all these learnings applied and out the door for people all around the world to enjoy because yes, SandboxRanch.com can now ship ANYWHERE right from the shop!

You can already see the quality of the cutting-out and the excavation is dramatically cleaner than the very first batch of custom square letter banks I made at SandboxRanch.com… this is only possible with a lot of testing, optimization, prototyping and more testing in endless circles of improving things.

After cutting out this batch of custom square letter banks, it’s time to jigsaw them all out of the wooden slab I so lovingly created in the first place at SandboxRanch.com.

The jigsaw just cuts out the rough custom square letter banks so that I can then go over it with my router table to remove the left-over skin of red oak all around the banks, left there on purpose, to hold them down using my vacuum table.

Now that the wooden aspect of these custom square letter banks is finished, it’s time to cut out the front windows, using our CNC laser, for each and every one of these… of course, as this is the first run of these windows on the updated design, it requires more prototyping.

But first, look at the picture below, the “C” is what tung oil does to the color and texture of these awesome custom square letter banks, this is one of the options that is available and in my opinion, unless you plan on finishing the banks yourself, a bare minimum to add a lot more beauty and resilience, as well as protection to your very own custom square letter bank.

MDF is cheaper than acrylic, so I do all my testing using this material, and once that’s sorted, the next step is cutting it out of the acrylic.

The custom banking business is a lot more involved than at first sight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYlrz6dMwKk/

Luckily, my time spent optimizing these front windows, countless hours at SandboxRanch.com, have produced a method to get these right the first time, in both form, fit and function!

These fronts look great, the next step is acrylic versions of the same thing, they are the same thickness, so I’m also able to test the edge quality of all these custom square letter banks as well.

Acrylic is transparent, so you can see the money you put in the bank, which I think is the most fun part of the whole process in getting these, after customizing it to suit your ultimate personal aesthetic.

Acrylic is like cutting gas, there is fire, there is flame and there is danger, but luckily, I know what I’m doing, haven cut a ton of acrylic at CNCROi.com over the years.

The acrylic isn’t only the front but also holds in the coins, so having drill holes in them is vital, the next step with the wooden banks is to actually have the machine do the drill holes, which will save me a lot of time and produce a more consistent product rather than manually doing so with a drill at SandboxRanch.com for each and every custom square letter bank.

The nice thing about acrylic is that it’s completely transparent, the bad thing about acrylic is that it’s completely transparent, which is why SandboxRanch.com also offers engraving of whatever you want, on the front of the acrylic and many different acrylic choices as well, from different colors to even transparencies.

This second batch of custom square letter banks came out even better than the last, it’s a crazy amount of work to get things to this point, and there is always room for further improvement, which I’m chipping away at with each bank I produce at SandboxRanch.com.

Want a custom square letter banks? Visit our online store and feel free to contact us if you want something even more custom at SandboxRanch.com.

The post Second Batch of Custom Square Letter Banks appeared first on SandboxRanch.com.

I’ve been in a holding pattern for the better part of two weeks because of supply chain issues, basically, the bits I use to do these jobs with are no longer available so I had to find a new supplier, which ended-up being a very positive thing so now we are back in business at SandboxRanch.com!

The first step in making these custom letter banks (and shapes to come) is getting the rough sawed red oak lumber from the mill, this is kiln dried and pretty thick stuff that needs to be cut into smaller pieces and flattened before gluing it together in a sheet then finally milling it into awesome letter banks.

As this was the last bit of an earlier test run, you can see how these slabs came together by watching the video below.

The same steps, though with continual small improvements to produce a more consistent result, are used throughout the production process, lots of work is done at SandboxRanch.com before any letter banks are cut out at the shop.

The reason that these rough sawed lumber are cut down is to create a stronger end-product and reduce warping, wood isn’t a material that’s the same density throughout, there are pockets of more and less density, and this is what causes warping in the wood (and possibly your bank).

Density of the red oak affects how much humidity is sucked in, how much is there already and the direction of the warp, so mixing it up tends to soften the blow, and make densities more even throughout the letter bank.

You’ll also notice that yes, this is real wood, and yes there are knots (which we avoid using for bank) and there is also some variation in the color and grain pattern… all tell-tale signs that this is very much not a man made product that SandboxRanch.com is making your letter banks from.

After the glue is dry and both sides of the newly formed laminated slab flattened, the next step is to cut out some awesome custom letter banks!

There are 8 separate operations across two different bit types used by our CNC router to produce the finished kiln dried red oak bank at SandboxRanch.com, some are faster than others.

The first operation is making the slot for the coins to go into the excavated area, which is the second operation you see happening on this first bank production run.

Of course, lots of saw dust is created by our CNC router, but there was a lot made before this step just to get to this point for these custom letter banks, but you can clearly see B, M and C coming into being.

There is quite a bit of wasted material in this first bank production run, I made a mistake and put in the machine the length and width reversed, I had enough room for two more custom letter banks but as you see, there was no room because the orientation was 90 degrees off… don’t worry, I kept that unused area to make other product ideas at SandboxRanch.com.

You can now clearly see F, Y and A letter banks coming into being for this first bank production run, the order isn’t alphabetical as I’m trying to optimize placement of the letters to make as many with as little wasted material as possible.

For example, the Y and A letter banks actually can fit closer together due to the opposite sharp angle of these countering one another while the B and the M letter banks have to be straight one next to the other.

As mentioned earlier for this first bank production run, I use two bits, the first one has done its job, it cleared out as much material as possible for the next bit to clean everything up at SandboxRanch.com.

The first bit leaves a very rough finish everywhere, while the second bit produces a far cleaner result, it isn’t sanding it by any means, but getting rid of major gouges and other issues caused by a rougher bit that’s focused purely on removing as much material as possible.

As such, the first operation for making these custom red oak letter banks is the most time-consuming, the other bit is just going along the edges of everything, much quicker, to clean up the bottoms of the banks and the edges throughout… and finally almost cutting it out.

Now that this first bank production run is complete, as far as the CNC router is involved, it’s time to cut them all out, something I don’t do with my CNC router because I don’t want these banks to go flying across the shop, this is a manual process.

There are several ways to remove the letter banks from the wooden slab, but after lots of trial and error – watch the video below – I’ve come to the conclusion that the jigsaw is the best tool followed by my router table.

Yeah, this whole process of developing these letter banks into viable products has taken a lot of learning to do properly, and there is always room for improvements at SandboxRanch.com.

As this was the first bank production run, I needed to test out the front windows as well, as those were never sorted out in earlier runs, each time I make a change to the letter banks, this process must be done again to assure the best form and function for the windows.

I use MDF because it’s the cheapest material possible to see how the front windows fit and whatever I cut with the laser using this MDF also holes true for the acrylic of the same thickness.

After all the settings are sorted out with the MDF front windows, notice the important addition of the screw holes, this way, no special jigs are required, placement is intuitive for all the hardware involved… this of course, is another thing I’m continually improving up on at SandboxRanch.com.

The MDF test fits work perfectly though, as you can see in the image below of the first bank production run.

The acrylic in this photo below may look green but it’s completely transparent, it’s the masking on both sides that is a green color, which comes off, that’s giving you the false color.

Laser cutting acrylic is like cutting through gas, there is fire and a big flame going underneath that you only see because of the material transparency, this is why it’s important to have a good extraction and compressed air system, otherwise the whole shop would catch fire and burn to the ground.

The first step is cutting out all the screws holes and then the outline of all the first bank production run items, this way, everything stays accurate and within spec, probably way overkill for this particular application but no point cutting corners when you have a system and a process that has been working flawlessly for years at CNCROi.com.

You can see how great the front windows of all these kiln dried red oak banks will appear, the masking might appear rough and some burn marks here and there but don’t worry, all of that comes off with the masking.

Once all the banks are cut along with the windows, it’s time to assemble the banks at SandboxRanch.com with the different hardware involved, I’ll be doing the staining on this first bank production run down the line, right now, I’m just checking off all my boxes regarding fit, function and quality.

Of course, all the banks head into the laser for one final branding on the back, if you want to order more custom letter banks from SandboxRanch.com, you got to know where they came from!

And below is the first bank production run of raw banks, I’ll take another picture once the staining with tung oil is done and the front windows all branded for whom they will be going to, but overall, very excited to finally have products ready for customers at SandboxRanch.com.

Need some custom woodworking or bank, contact us at SandboxRanch.com and/or CNCROi.com right now!

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