Christmas time is here, and home made prezzies are always better than bought ones, so time to press the printNC into service.

Lately we have been having the typical lack of experienced tradesmen problem which has led to a whole pile of weld failures due to undersized welds. This is not really a lack of skill issue more so a lack of experience and supervision problem, fixing the lack of supervision problem roles back around to the lack of experienced workers problem, a catch 22. In the past I have made special weld gauges for non standard welds, so I had the thought "what if I just made these guys a gauge for the most common weld size we use, and make it keychain sized". It’s also Christmas, an easy excuse to make and give them out without insulting anyone, that paired up with some funny socks and its just a fun Christmas gift.

I didn’t take many pictures, because I wasn’t really thinking about posting, but then thought "hey why not, its more content for the site, and might give some guys an idea of things to use there router for"

6mm is the most common size we use, and when it calls for 8mm or more they always end up oversized anyhow, so 6mm is what i went with.

15 minutes in fusion and i had a working model

A couple more minutes to make the tool path

A few left over pieces of .040 aluminum....as you can see by the one laying there, I missed including tool path for the holes when i exported the g code....Dooohhh, i just drilled them on the drill press afterword

A few swipes with a red scotch brite to de-burr and hand stamped in lettering for a little more of a home made feel (i could have engraved it, but opted to stamp, this was not a mistake)

of the 12 i gave out 9, it was really only targeted at 4 guys, but I figured what the heck, it doesn’t take much time to make a bunch, ill make enough for everyone, office staff, foreman’s, no one was immune, and everyone thought they were pretty neat

So there you go, one more excuse to build a cnc router