Thank you gift ideas?

[Matt Turner (physics)]

Hi all,

Our 400W laser is arriving tomorrow!! It's going to be a little while before we get everything set up and working, but I wanted to start getting ideas of thank you gifts that I could make using it for all the people who helped get it here. There were a lot of people involved in our grant proposal and the prep and installation work, and I thought it would be neat to make something customized for each person who helped in some way.

These people are mostly physicists and engineers, so something useful would probably be best. I was thinking of maybe doing wallet tool cards (check Google for examples) or something similar in stainless. I thought about trying to make something in titanium, but it would probably be too expensive.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Matt

[Martin Boekers]

I always liked these.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:211

You could make it part of a card holder.
Google Images .......Gear Business cards and you'll see a verity folks have made.
These would be sweet out of stainless!

[Paul Phillips]

Hi Matt,
Thinking in terms of making something out of SS, instead of using the real thing you could save some money and buy some anodized aluminum sheet with a variety of colors and finishes, you could buy a 4'x8' sheet and cut it easily into whatever shapes you wanted, great for business card type ideas like what mike linked to, engraves nice to.
http://www.chemetal.com/designs/346-graphite
You could also make some small wood boxes that were personalized, do a search here, I like the round/living hinged boxes. Another idea, I have a puzzle sculpture of a spider that I got as sample from MultiCam that they did on a similar (400w) laser out of .063" mild steel, I think these are possibly from laserbuzz or similar and most people here do them out of 1/8" plywood but you can easily convert them to .063 metal.
Man that machine sounds fun! Enjoy,
Paul
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