Trade Made
Signage & CNC Specialists
Birch Plywood Christmas Trees
We where asked to produce a number of birch plywood Christmas trees for an event company , the tress we made in 2 sizes one 8 ft high and one 4 ft high. All the trees we to be produced in high quality 18mm birch plywood which we sourced and supplied for the customer, the trees had to be a flat pack and very easy to assembly as they where sent straight to shops for the shop owners to assembly themselves so they need to be simple to install.
PROCESS / SET UP
The customer sent us the tree outline in an abode illustrator file via email we opened the file and checked the artwork to make sure it was all ok and to scale once we done this we could start to set it up for CNC machining.
CNC ROUTERING
Once we had the file set up for the CNC Router we then need to set up the actual machine with the correct tooling and material, with this being birch plywood we need to use special tooling to stop it tearing the top and bottom surfaces while retaining a smooth edge, you can use a compression spiral for this but we find they break pretty easily and are too expensive for what they are plus they do not give the best edge finish to the plywood due to the vibration with in the tooling profile so we don't really use them on birch plywood we use a combination of different tools to get the absolute best finish possible on all the 3 edges top, core and bottom this takes longer to cut but leaves a super smooth finish on all the edges no need for sanding after machining this is where the quality of cut speaks for itself and years of experience cutting birch plywood really shows in the final component.
With the trees being a flat pack they needed to have some way of fitting together so we made some internal locking parts which would hold all the 4 sides of the tree, with these parts holding the tree together we had to make sure the fit was perfect not to loose or not to tight so we made some test pieces just to check fit we kept a close eye on this as the material thickness of the birch plywood can change from sheet to sheet and this can cause the fit to be either to tight or to loose so a close eye on this was essential.
.png)
Once all the CNC work was done we simply put the trees on a pallet and the customer come down and collected them, a simply straight forward birch plywood job something we do all the time.
CNC TEST FITTING