From now on you can order sample necklaces at Snijlab. You may have already known about the samples, but that you can order them in a necklace is new.
Since the beginning, Snijlab has been offering square samples with a corner taken out, and for now that's not going to change either. This design still shows all the important sides to consider in your choice of materials.
New is the necklace. Samples are a tool in a design process, to evaluate a material it is good to compare it with similar materials. Therefore we have created chains per category and per application. We hope this will support you as a designer in choosing a material.
Why do we make the samples this way?
Our samples have had the same design for years because it allows you to assess all the different aspects of a laser-cut material. The recognizable corner cut out shows how wide the laser beam cuts.
The open and filled circle show what a line and plane engraving look like. A line engraving is often more intense color, while a plane engraving is an even shape. In wood, engravings become dark brown, but in other materials they can also become lighter, such as in frost acrylic.
Samples are of course cut on our own machines, so they give a reliable picture of what to expect. With each material, pay attention to how the edge quality of the sample is. With wood, for example, soot forms along the edge, while plastic sometimes becomes shiny or very sharp.
Why should I order a sample?
Some material properties are best seen in real life. We do our best with photos, sometimes videos and technical specifications to show a clear picture of a material. But nothing is clearer than a material sample in your hand.
Transferring the flexibility of a material is very difficult, for example, the thinnest kind of bamboo we have is almost as bendable as paper. But what kind of paper are we talking about? For example, we also misjudged the ductility of pet felt , which in turn is much stiffer than we thought.
In turn, other materials are translucent, such as white polyacetal (POM) or some types of acrylic. We can express light transmittance in numbers, but that is difficult to imagine when designing a product.
