How to Make a Producible Enamel Pin Design

As we all know there are gaps between design word and real word. We can turn almost any design into pin but firstly need to ensure the design is producible. So how to make sure the design is producible?

There are 3 measure ways:

A. If the design is easy to produce

When I say producible design, it means the design is easy to produce. The production process is within our current pin making process, no need extra works.

As you know know working flow lines helps to increase production efficiency and lower production cost. If your pin’s production process stick with our current working flow, less production time is needed and cost is most economic.

It is important to keep balance between fancy design and production efficiency & cost. If the pin design requires production steps that out of our current working flow, it will slow down entire work speed.

B. If the design is within tool limitation.

Precision of CNC engraving machine

Due to Precision of carving tools, The CNC engraving machine is able to create metal lines thickness equal and more than 1mm. If a design requires metal lines to be 0.8mm or any thickness lower than 1mm, that’s beyond our machine’s limitation. The design need to be improved.

Color Area Size Limitation

To ensure all colors can be fulled in, please make sure the color area is big enough for injector. If design has color area 1*1mm, 1*2mm, something like that. Technically it is able to produce, but since it’s too small to notice, workers my forget it and skip it. This kind of design higher defective rate. We may consider it as un-producible and need improvement.

Polish limitation

Pins are polished in bulk by polish machine. The polish process make sure all burrs are gone and pin surface is smooth enough for plating or dyed. In a word, the polish process is unable to polish each corner of pin. Especially for 3D pin with a complicated design. If there is a 3D pin design with a very small size, like 0.5 inch. Mold technician & polish worker will have a headache for sure.