What I hope to achieve when my tool arises

I seen a post a few days ago about someone making pickups for guitars and asking who else would be making " parts". In my line of work I use a ton of wood, acrylic and aluminum. My goal is to cut out a few time consuming steps in my fabrication process. This is where I would generally start. Find a nice shape within the dimensions of what I am doing and make a burn template.


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I would then use the burn template to make an actual template that I could copy as many times as I needed for the job.

After I had my wood template I can then transfer it to acrylic as a final product or transfer to acrylic as another template to use for machine aluminum. If I am using aluminum as my final product I need to use acrylic as my template as the cutting fluid used on aluminum likes to saturate the wood template and ruin it. If all the steps are done correctly and with precision I end up with this.
My hope is to just jump right from the CAD drawing or other form of data design right to an acrylic product or acrylic template for machining aluminum. It would cut out a lot of time and wasted materials in my fabrication. Also I could save my designs and use them as a source of income to sell either an acrylic template itself or just the file to other people in my industry.

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Those look great!
What are they? :slight_smile:

Have you considered buying a CNC milling machine so you could go straight from CAD to aluminum?

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Those are aluminum speaker grilles for a set of home tower speaker cabinets I’m building. I’m almost ready for final assembly.


I have been looking at CNC recently and will use income generated with my Glowforge to get one in the future.

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