[Watchmaking] EP.4 Order metal laser cuts for the dial base

Let's order the metal laser cuts for the dial base material. Let's talk about some of the options I considered and my experience.


1. Ponoko https://www.ponoko.com/

If you search the internet for sheet metal laser cut, you'll easily find the Ponoko site. It's probably the largest site in the industry. They offer cutting services for all kinds of different materials: metal, wood, plastic, paper, etc. I haven't had the chance to use it myself.


Pros.

You can upload an illustrator file and get an instant quote. I've seen sites that offer similar features, but they often have errors when loading the illustrator file, or the drawing is too small, or the holes to be cut is too close. Ponoko reads the file correctly.

There are so many material options. They offer a wide variety of metal plates by size, and they also offer other material services such as wood, plastic, and paper.

Cons

For metal plates, the thinnest thickness was 0.5mm. Apparently, they don't handle metal sheets that are too thin because they deform when they're laser cut.

And when I compared their quotes, they were a bit higher than other sites.


2. Laser Boost https://www.laserboost.com/

This is a site I learned about from the custom keyboard internet community. They offer laser cutting services for metal plates. This is the service I actually used.


Pros.

Like Ponoko, you can upload an illustrator file and get an instant quote.

The price is lower than Ponoko.

They offer a variety of finishing services. I chose sandblast finishing to make sure the paint sticks well when painting.

Cons

Again, the thinnest thickness is 0.5mm. In my previous post (link), I mentioned that the dial should be 0.4mm thick with NH35 movement, and at the time I thought it wouldn't be a big deal since 0.5mm is only a 0.1mm difference, but it wasn't. (I'll cover that in a separate post later.) If you order it at 0.5mm, you'll need to grind it down to 0.3mm to make the dial easier to fabricate. (which is not easy to do.)


I ordered some 0.5mm dials in brass from laserboost anyway. More than half of them were bent, which made them useless, but I was able to salvage a few that I could work with anyway.

I'm not sure if this is due to the laser cutting or the sandblasting, but more than half of the dials I ordered were bent like this.



3. Local laser cutting shop

After doing some work on the 0.5mm dials I ordered from laserboost, like painting them, they became thicker, and I ran into a problem with the watch I built.

I realized that I needed to make the dial thinner, so I tried to grind the 0.5mm dial with sandpaper to make it thinner. When I tried it, I realized that it was not as easy as I thought to grind a thin metal plate evenly thinner.


As I mentioned above, online services only offer services for thicknesses of 0.5mm or more. I searched the Internet and called local laser cutting shops nearby, and they all said that it was difficult to cut 0.3mm sheet metal. One shop said that if I brought the metal plate to them, they would process it, but they could not guarantee the result.


So I bought the metal plate separately and asked them to machine it for me on the condition that they wouldn't be responsible for the result. Luckily, I was able to get a satisfactory result. 😊👍




So now I have the base metal for my own dial.

Now it's time to paint the dials!!

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