Business Card Jig (Snapmarks)

Beyond the Manual
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Hi all!

I’ve recently taken a lot of orders for stainless steel business cards. They look really sharp and they are different, so I wanted to share the jig. This is the single one, but you can easily resize it for however many you’d like. Here is the list of supplies (minus the PG draft board used):

Blanks - these are far better quality than any of the ones I’ve ordered from amazon:

Marking material:

Settings: You can use the settings for the MacBook or similar items, otherwise 100% power (pro), 450lpi, and full speed. A full card will take roughly 8 minutes per side using those settings. You can certainly adjust as you see fit, but those work the best for me.

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Here is the jig file:
steel business cards copy.pdf (353.5 KB) steel%20business%20cards

22 Likes
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Might want to add “snapmark” to the title so people without snaps don’t have to click through. Not everyone has them of course.

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Nice, thanks! Those business cards would work great as equipment labels as well.

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Good call!

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These are awesome! I am going to move this over to Beyond the Manual. That is where we post non-GF settings. i would definitely add the jig file to the free designs without the settings. That is a great share!

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They look great. I would prefer business cards to have a rounded corner, so as to not get poked with a sharp corner.

Thank you for your jig!

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True, but if a user has run the new calibration routine, you don’t necessarily need them. Here’s a jig I created with fiduciaries. The engraving file has them in a locked layer, so I get repeatable positioning.

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I’m going to find out if they can supply ones with a rounded edge.

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I can’t say I’ve ever seen that - is there some documentation on this process I can look at?

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Sure, the new Camera Calibration tool was introduced in June…

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Which is fine as long as rotational accuracy isn’t a key component. That’s what snapmarks bring to the table of course.

There are ways to mitigate all of this of course, but we digress. Just a thing to think about.

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Well, yeah…

If you have snapmarks, you don’t need the manual fiducials.

If you don’t have snapmarks, you never, ever will, so some sort of manual fiducial is a valid workaround. The Snapmark fiducials included in the OP will serve nicely, so I the jig template will work just fine for the Snapmark-challenged (like myself).

Sure, you have to manually eliminate rotational changes. Many ways to do it – I use a 5" roofer’s triangle squared against the front door, but any right triangle or rectangle cut out of any rigid material will do the job. Could even be made part of the jig…

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Even after manual calibration my machine was off easily by 1/4” on the right side. It was pretty good left side on on the right it was a train wreck.

I was too lazy to redo it, i tend toward jigs because either I need 1/10” accuracy or I need dead on accuracy and for that I will always reach for a jig.

None of this is to say that the right person with the right machine and the right settings can’t get really good results with fiducials plus camera, but it should come with all the caveats that any camera alignment job should come with, like (especially) setting the material height to the height of the jig- not of your final engraving/cut, etc.

For me, I’ll make a jig designed to fit in a fresh cut jig if it’s a job that I’ll repeat a lot and alignment is very important.

1 Like