Made a business card holder

[alloy]

Still trying to learn Mastercam and wanted to make something cool to put on my table at old car swap meets to show off my new capabilities.

I wish I'd had longer material so I could have turned the cards long ways, but I used what I had available.

I'm looking for products to make a sell, I wonder if anyone on Ebay would want one?

 

[T Bredehoft]

Nice, I keep wishing I had CNC capabilities, but the economics say there's no place for it here. Oh Well...

 

[rgray]

Looks nice. With longer pieces and sideways cards I think it would be a great ebay item.
But ebay for me is getting way harder to sell on than it was 15 years ago.
So much stuff and large accounts get search results and top of page.
I've put things on there and the whole 5 day auction can run out with only 1 or 2 views. Years ago anything I put on would have minimum of 25 views and many times near 100.
It's almost as bad amazon nowadays.

You might sell more at the swap meet than on ebay. You don't lose 10% that way either like on ebay.

 

[rwm]

I think that is brilliant. I'll bet it would sell. I agree with having the cards sideways.

Robert

 

[dlane]

Looks good , what size wrench is it.

 

[francist]

Looks great!
When I think of all the business cards I have seen, the ones that one first to mind are the unusual ones:
One made out of transparent plastic, one that was square instead of rectangular, one made from wood veneer...
Don't think that horizontal is the only way, it's just the way everyone else does theirs.

-frank

 

[alloy]

Thanks guys. I like creating things that I think up. I'm just beginning to unlock the potential of Mastercam. I spent two days trying to figure out how to manipulate the work coordinate system and bring in a STL file of a wrench I found on Grabcad. The file was set up so Y was what I needed to change to Z, but no matter how I tried and how many videos I watched I couldn't get it. So I designed my own wrench.

I also agree that turning the card sideways would be best. This was practice for me and I want to make things I can use. I checked at metal supermarket and a 72" piece od 1" x 1-3/4" delivered is $120. That will make 10 parts. Once I get the program optimized I'll have about 25 minutes in making the part. Do you think I could sell them for $50 or so? I have a great reputation on Ebay so I think people would take a chance on me having been on there for 20 years now.

What size is it? Well it's a "TLIR", or "That Looks About Right"

 

[Boswell]

are you making that out of 6061 Aluminum? I just checked and Online-Metals sells a 72" 1"x1.75" for 61.22 and delivered to my house for 27.46. Total 88.68. However, I almost never order online but go to a local metal supply for my aluminum. I also recommend that you make it to a specific size. People that would buy this will want to know what size it fits, so why not. Finally $50 each sound like a lot of $ for a business card holder. I am sure that you would sell a few but it is hard to believe that there is a big untapped market for $50 novelty business card holders. Just my out-loud thinking. Good luck.

 

[alloy]

I'm trying to cover my cost. if it takes me 25 minutes I at least want a $1 per minute of machine time. So that would be $25 plus material. And yes 6061.

Here is what my quote form online metals is. For me to go get it that would be a 130 mile round trip. Having it shipped is a better option for me by far. I wonder why your quote is so much cheaper?




Quote from rgray

"But ebay for me is getting way harder to sell on than it was 15 years ago.
So much stuff and large accounts get search results and top of page.
I've put things on there and the whole 5 day auction can run out with only 1 or 2 views. Years ago anything I put on would have minimum of 25 views and many times near 100.
It's almost as bad amazon nowadays.

You might sell more at the swap meet than on ebay. You don't lose 10% that way either like on ebay."



I do transmission cable drive mods and I'm the only one in the world that does them so I get a lot of hits on Ebay. A couple of them are over 12k views in about 3 years now and 151 down to 34 watchers for my newest item. I guess I'm lucky what I do is so popular. I also hate the fees they charge. My monthly bill from them can run up to $200 depending on sales. If I could find a way to get to every hot rodder and transmission shop and rod shop and show them what I do. I'd not have to use ebay and I'd have to hire a crew to handle the work. But a lot of guys like me are older and a lot of them don't use computer at all so they have now way other than the swap meet to find out about me.

 

[JimDawson]

That's about a 3 minute part. I know your machine has enough HP to do it.

This part is about the same size and complexity of your card holder. Cycle time for 6 parts below is a about 15 minutes including load, drill, screw down, and unload time. This little fixture is held in the vice. I think these are finished at 0.625 tall x 0.75 wide, but it starts out life as a chunk of 1x1 inch 6061, cut to fixture length, then 3 lengths are clamped to the fixture long enough to get some screw holes in them. 3/8 carbide endmill, 6000 RPM ('cause that's all we got ), maybe around 160-180 IPM or so. 4 or 5 tool changes.

For the price Metal Supermarkets wants for that 6 ft bar of 1x1.75, you could get a full 20 ft bar at Coast Aluminum.

Since this is a low volume part, these are just run on this small fixture. If we needed a lot of these, we would just buy bars of 5/8 x 14 and run them on tabel size pallets, 60 or so at a time. I'm guessing you could run 30 or 40 card holders on your machine on one pallet. You're going to have to make another trip over here to see how Jared is doing high efficiency machining, and get a little help with high speed toolpaths in MasterCam.