Bag Tags for Birthday Party

Experimenting with aluminum and thought I would personalize the gift bags for my daughter’s birthday party. By the time I was done, I figured out how to do it. Now, I know how to do it right, the job is done. Still, the kids dug it and they turned their tags into necklaces at the party.

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Hah, that’s the exact same feeling I have when I help my friend with his prop business - as soon as I figure out the best method for building whatever portion I’m working on, I’ve just finished my last one :smile:

Those look really fantastic, nice job!

well you could throw some of those up on etsy and make custom tags for people. if you wanted to continue making them

No kidding, those look like the perfect thing for Etsy, sell them in 5/10 packs, seems like a decent gig :smile:

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I think if I was going to do it again, or any aluminum for that matter, I might bolt down a 13x9 aluminum cake pan on my waste board, then fasten my stock inside the pan. That way the sides of the pan should contain the chip spray along with the WD-40 spray. For the profile cut, i sucked out the chips and re-lubricated on every 2nd pass. And the push button on my WD-40 is touchy - it’s hard not to douse the work area. It was very messy. Also, it’s hard to dial in the etching bit “zero z” to make a perfect etch. There is a very, very small etching sweet spot for aluminum. I might start etching above the surface and do multiple passes in .001 increments until it makes contact and provides a good result. OR try to find a metal-capable V bit, which would be super cool, but I am not sure if they exist. Anyone?

You should make a z-zero touch plate, only takes maybe 15 minutes or so, and you can reliably zero out your tool each time.

[edit] And if you do end up going with a cake-pan work shield, let me know how it goes. I’ve been wanting to try grinding some glass on my machine, but I need a way to partition off the area so that my spoil board doesn’t get wet.

@Earwigger those look great!

That’s happened to me a few times—but figuring it out is the fun part anyway so I don’t really mind.

Nice work on the tags, @Earwigger! Maybe you could post a project at World's Easiest CNC System for Machining | Inventables to share what you learned :smile:

That’s cool, I’ve never seen that array of projects before. I never noticed the “ALL PROJECTS” option on that page so every time I went there it was the same 6 or 9 things. I’ll have cooler stuff to post eventually.

@peterjames…the touchplate is intriguing…how would you go about doing that with this machine? I have very little experience in this arena but I find that setting my true zero is dicey and the touch plate would be of great benefit.

I briefly go over the steps in this post:

It’s nice because I typically user Chilipeppr, which has support for it, so it’s easy to do. For the times when I’m using Easel, I’ll use the “wiggle a piece of paper under the bit” method, which seems to work well enough for the wood projects I’ve been doing.

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very cool. I havnt tried cutting anything but wood yet. I did the same thing as this for all xmas gift tags this year (but in wood). Was a big hit :smile: