Shop Tip: Collect Material Samples for Your Workshop
Sean shares his collection of material samples that he uses for his workspace and Tested’s workshop. These samples become invaluable when figuring out what kind of resins to use for casting, material for laser cutting, and even fabric for cut and sew work. What kind of material samples do you have in your shop?
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add a list of the places you went to the comments please so we can get the samples as well.
Gel pack: https://www.amazon.com/Rosco-Cinegel-Inch-3-25-Swatchbook/dp/B006OGNLNC
Laser Samples: https://www.johnsonplastics.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=samples
Industrial Samples: https://www.mcmaster.com/ – many material sections have an ‘About’ at the beginning – great for general info – will sometimes have samplers listed at beginning.
Will be talking about this one more later but good for plastics and injection molding samples:
https://www.protolabs.com/resources/design-aids/
Forgot one!
Stickers: https://www.stickergiant.com/
If your projects or jobs require color matching, or even just the precise communication of color values, the single most useful thing you can have in your shop is a Pantone Coated Combo Color Guide. It will save you hours upon hours of work trying to decipher what a client means by “you know, a minty mauve with coffee overtones” or “I want it to be eggplant but with a less snarky purple.” I even have a sign up in my shop that says: Peach and Pumpkin are foods. Colors have numbers.
Audio stereo image is reversed? Norm’s audio seems to be on the left, despite being on the right in the video.
Being an architect I have lots of samples. from stones, plastics, cladding, paint, carpets, lights, leathers, fabrics, walling, etc. love it. Wish I had a bigger library.
yup, i recently had a few fabric samples sent, originally for a chalk bag i wanted to make. now they’ll double for an en-suite adam edc bag.
some properties are just hard to communicate via text and accompanying images. once these properties cross a certain threshold of importance (either because you have no idea about the materials in question, or because of specificity of requirements), samples are invaluable.
regarding product images and colour: one thing i noticed is that way too often, you either don’t get comparable product photos – different scale, lighting, etc. – or, even worse, you get tinkered photos – one base photo with different colourisations added in photoshop, most likely from an abstract product colour chart. both of these make it unreasonably hard not only to colour-match with a reasonable degree of exactness, but even to choose working colour combinations. one of the sample sets i ordered was different cordura fabrics in their dark grey shade. only after having gotten the samples, i realised that they varied widely from cool, blue-ish greys to warm, brown-ish greys. each would read as a neutral dark grey in isolation, but once you put a warm and cool one next to each other, it’d be a glaring difference you couldn’t have identified from the photos.
The firm my wife office manages at just got rid of a bunch of those – have a bunch of cool stone and wood tiles now!
One thing about McMaster is that they don’t try to hide the vendor they got whatever from. So if you are looking for a nylon washer say, you can order some and the manufacturer of the washers will be on the box. That can be critical if you are planning to make your project a product or if you need further information from a manufacturer.
Every color should have a Munsel or Pantone number of it’s a manufactured product or coating.
https://munsell.com/color-products/color-standards/
Or you can get a Pantone Reference Library on Amazon for $ 1,168.58. Free stuff is great but don’t take a good bargain for granted.
Different heavy weight duck canvas weights. Paper samples for print making
I use a fair amount of Smooth-On products for mold making and casting, and frequently had a hard time figuring out the right thing to use for different applications. However, if you go to their retail subsidiary, Reynolds Advanced Materials, you can grab small sample chips of just about any product they make for free. It is really helpful.
Heyya Sean, that is epic mate.