When you turn out as many widgets as we do, it isn’t long before you end up with piles of worn out solder paste stencils. And when you’re surrounded by used metal stencils, you start to find creative uses for them. After all, even after they’ve been rendered useless as a stencil, they’re still perfectly good scraps of sheet metal. Some uses are practical: like using them as thermal shielding for hot air rework or using them to mask around smaller stencils; Some are less practical like polishing it up to use as a mirror… a really bad mirror, or trying to fold them into sheet-metal origami.
Aside from the various utilitarian ways in which these can be re-purposed, they also make cool design pieces for various kinds of art. Paint through them for geeky patterns, make them into lampshades or just frame them for some nerdy interior decorating. We have some of our favorites back-lit in a shadowbox and it definitely has a unique vibe.
Note: Because these are just scrap material we can’t control what size stencil you’re going to get. Some are as small as 2x2" while others are bigger than a sheet of copy paper. You will get ONE stencil. What size you get is just the luck of the draw. If you don’t feel lucky, move along.
