Catch Me If You Can

We decided to have a little fun in engineering and update our gingerbread person ornament so we could cut and give out to each of our staff this Christmas. A little extra design went into this one and much debate was had over the expression of the face: is he happy, sneaky, or mean? Below is a quick description of the process to make the ornament happen which is very similar to how we build a lot of our parts at Lean Machine.

It started with drawing in Autodesk Inventor. We tried to pick a shape that would be easy to cut so we didn’t start to cut into production times too badly (can you imagine explaining to a customer their order was late due to the gingerbread person!).

After programming, the process moved to the routers. This is the beauty of having a machine that can depth cut because we can engrave a lot of detail in.

The 2012 version on the left and the 2021 version on the right.