Laser Cutting 462 Gold Fish!

A CNCKing.com customer asked us if we can cut a couple a hundred gold-fish for a project they are working on. They sent us a picture of a gold-fish cracker for reference and we said NO PROBLEM!

We used 3 mm (1/8th inch) MDF for this project, they are to be painted so no point in using acrylic and it’s for indoor use so this should be more than fine. Stainless steel was out of the budget and thicker plywood was overkill.

How do you begin laser cutting 462 gold-fish? One at a time… 462 times!

Our Austrian CNC Trotec Laser did just that, each one identical to the previous one without asking for a break or breaking a sweat!

Unlike our Industrial CNC laser, I kept losing count of these so I multiplied rows by columns to give me the final count… we did a few extra ones.

The most fun part of this project was the “scrap” from all the fish, it was extremely fine and had the consistency of a chandelier, easily broken and fragile but still kept mostly together.

After the cutting was all done, all these 462 laser cut gold-fish were put in a box and shipped out. Here are a few more photos to show you these fish at other angles. By the way, reject rate was 0%.

As these were to be painted, there was no need to mask them, I’ve actually grown to like the slight “burned edges” of laser cut stuff and prefer leaving it on for my personal projects, material depending. When you contract us to mass product lots of stuff, I’ll ask you if you want the masking on or off, it’s up to you!

This was a quarter sheet of material and we cut all those fish out of only half of that, at this scale, we can easily cut over a thousand in one production cycle! So, if you need a thousand gold-fish TOMORROW, it’s not an issue for us at all!

You can watch the video!

Whether you need hundreds of gold-fish, toy cars or anything else, all cut precisely, accurately and at high quality, you’ve found us! Be sure to visit both CNCKing.com and CNCROi.com.