I have learned so much on these forums since getting my GF, so I thought I would share my latest project. I am an IT Director and wanted to create a set of challenge coins that I can carry around with me and give to staff if I catch them in the act of going above and beyond. Each coin will be good for 1 beverage of their choice either from our coffee shop, cafeteria, gift shop, or maybe even a beer if they catch me outside of work.
After trying extremely unsuccessfully to engrave the front and then flip and manually align, I decided to give Snapmarks a try. So using the attached template I created a layer called Front and added my artwork for the front of the coin, then I hid that layer and added another layer called back and added the artwork for the back of the coin directly and toggled the layers off and on to ensure they were lined up how I wanted them. I exported everything from Inkscape and uploaded to the GF. I set the coin back art to ignore, the snapmarks to score, the coin outlines and the box around the project to cut, and hit print.
Once it was done, I removed the piece of draftboard leaving just the newly created jig and coins. I flipped the coins over and hit the magnet to align the artwork. Much to my delight it worked perfectly the first time! I realize I am late to the game, but snapmarks are truly a lifesaver. I reversed the options for coin front and coin back options, set the outlines and snapmarks to ignore and hit print again.
The first pass in the pictures was scaled to the size of a quarter (24.26mm) but after the first batch was done, I decided I want the coins to be a bit larger, so for the template I am uploading I have removed all of my organization’s artwork and scaled up to slightly larger than the size of a half dollar (30.65mm).
Double sided engraving is very easy to do if you don’t want to (or can’t) go the snapmark route. There are threads about this, but the most thorough is here:
As a bonus, this method is much faster than and at least as accurate as using snapmarks.
I did a bunch of coins last year and I just engraved and cut the fronts and then without moving the board I just flipped each coin over and it worked perfectly. But I like the idea of the snapmarks template since I could then just cut or buy the blanks ahead of time and drop the coins in as needed. That reminds me that I never shared that project. And it has a fun twist so it worth sharing. I’ll share once I can dig up the photos.
I don’t have snapmarks yet but I cut a lot of double sided wooden coins. I have the rulers on each side of the GF and I always line my “jig” up on the left side and at 0" so I can always place it right back in the same location.
Any tips on how to get coins consistently the exact size? As far as I can tell there isn’t a circle tool that makes like 1.3 inch circles or whatever size you want precisely.
