The reasons as to why you would need to make your very own custom medal could be many or it could be few. But medals are created to show our appreciation for people that have worked extra hard to prove themselves to be better than everyone else. Medals are mostly awarded to athletes after sporting events. The victor and the 2nd placed athlete or team usually get a medal for their hard work.
However, medals can also be made for ordinary people who have also worked extra hard, honestly, and actively in the office. These people are awarded medals for their efforts and devotion towards a company. And what better way to show your appreciation to your best workers, then by awarding them with a custom made a medal.
But in order to give someone a custom medal, you need to understand the process of making one.
This article will focus solely on how to make custom medals, so stick around as this article might prove useful to you.
Table of Contents
The Process of Making Custom Medals
1.The Design
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First things first, you need a custom design for your medal. This is usually done in a software which is later put into a die making computer to create the mold.
2.Preparing the Mold
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The mold, usually a small blank piece, is the thing from which you create the medal. But before we start engraving it, we need to prepare the working table. The mold is then properly secured and the cutting machine is properly installed.
3.Making The Mold
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According to GS-JJ.com, the next step is very important as an error would require you to start all over. The quality of the mold is also very important as it directly affects the quality of the pin. The cutting machine directly engraves the design onto the mold. As soon as the design is finished and engraved onto the mold, we need to deburr to effectively clean it from any metal shavings.
4.Zinc Casting
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This process involves opening channels to ease the flow of molten zinc into the mold itself. Then we carefully hand polish the mold to make the edges nice and smooth before polishing the old marks left by the cutting tool.
Then the mold is securely placed into a gravity-casting machine upon which molten liquid zinc will flow into the mold. When everything cools down, we take the mold and proceed to the next step.
5.Electroplating the Medals
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After your custom medals have been casted, deburred, and polished, the next step is to electroplate the medals. Once the electroplating process is finished, we need to bake the medals into an industrial oven to make them dry.
6.Final Polishing
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Once the medals are nice and dried, we organize them and give them a final polishing. Each side of each medal is polished individual by hand and later inspected to make sure that each medal is of the highest quality.
7.Spraying Clear Lacquer
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The medal is all done, but one last process needs to be made for the medal to be ready. We need to spray clear lacquer to protect the finished plating. This process is finished with baking the medal until the same process is then repeated on the other side.