Make Money With your CNC Machine | Custom Outlet and Switch Covers

CNC Machines are Money Making Machines! - Desktop CNC machines or non-industrial or commercial units are viewed as toys. That is far from the case. CNC machines provide an individual or shop with the ability to bring new capabilities to the shop that they would not be able to before. In addition to completely new opportunities and products, a shop or company can add additional value to their current products. Increase precision, engravings, designs, production work, etc. A CNC machine should be valued as advanced technology just like a powered table saw was back when the handsaw was the only alternative. CNC machines will not replace all aspects of your shop but will aid a shop in becoming more efficient, bring new capabilities and products to their customers, and provide added value products that maybe your competitor is or is not doing.

 

Custom Outlet and Switch Covers

We see in homes all the time, whether they are mid level or higher end homes, the options for outlet and switch covers are vast but also few and far between. If you or the client wants something that isn't wood, well they we can't help them (sorta). If they want something out of wood or another material we can CNC, our opportunity is knocking. This biggest thing we see in high end homes, is folks want wooden outlet and switch covers but the selection of the big supplier is generic and doesn't come from the same supply or region of wood the homes trim or cabinetry came from. With the power of CNC machines, a shop that does the trim and/or cabinetry can now offer nearly perfect matching outlet and switch covers to their customer. This is a value added product that was not obtainable before and instead of marking up a product in a catalog, we can offer it to our customer utilizing a piece of machinery that can work while we work on the main product that they hired us for.

Raw Stock to Beautiful Covers

The process isn't labor intensive at all. Most likely someone that buys a machine that is capability of "production" work will have the machinery to mill the material to the required 1/4" (.25") thickness. The beautiful thing is we don't have to get it exactly to .25". If our material comes out of the drum sander at .27" or .30", we can adjust that in our CAD/CAM program. Once our material is ready, we can head to the CNC machine. But lets go step by step in how we went from raw stock to beautiful covers.

CAD/CAM

CNC machines are controlled by computers. The computer is controlled by the G-code (CNC language) that you design in your CAD (Computer aided design)/CAM (Computer aided machining/milling). A CNC user needs to design their product in a program. That program is going to generate g-code based on the tool paths that you described. We put out a video on the CAD/CAM for the outlet and switch covers.

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