ORIGINAL: Jim_Purcha
Great a composite aluminum template more expensive and stronger to cut a pattern for ''balsa wood''. Seems like overkill. What about a 16 ga crs laser cut pattern.
Jim
ORIGINAL: dhal22
ORIGINAL: Rendegade
um, what's composite aluminium?
It would be overkill, however, the price of the product is not in consideration regarding the cost of the product. There are benefits offered to some employees. At this shop, the price paid to recycle unused product is not worth the effort to collect it and store it. So the owner of the company allows its employees to use his shop and scraps for any business of personal use they should wat. In this case, the owner knows what my friend is wanting to do, and is allowing him to use company equipment and scrap material. Pretty cool in my opinion.
Believe me, you are not going to pay for the actual cost to mfg these templates. As you can see, this is more of a "service" then it could ever be a "business."
My friend has been doing this for quite some time with other products. This is just a way I can offer some help to others that have helped me so much.
I understand the questions. I hope I have alleviated the "overkill" idea. It would be if this wasn't such a good deal and so available.
As for what composite aluminum is, here is what my friend told me:
"Yeah, I thought that might come up. Most people know what Composite is, and what Aluminium is but generally you get a shoulder shrug when talking about "Composite Aluminium. Here is the website for the material we use...
http://www.alpolic-usa.com/pages/products.php
It's basically a solid composite core("a fire resistant mineral filled or standard polyethylene core"), either black or white with a thin layer of alumnium on both sides. One side will be nicely painted and the other side will be a various primer color. It is around $1000 for a 16' x 4' sheet. Due to the difficulty of seperating the two of them, the scrap is pretty much worthless (around 4 cents per pound) the only country that wants it is China so after shipping/etc.. it's not worth much. Thats good news for me (us) because I get an abundance of cool material for projects 
- Brian"
My friend's name is Brian too. This is not me, however.
I believe this to make good material for cutting templates for foam cores as well.
If there are any more questions, please ask. Don't let the quality of the material put you out. It may be too good to use for templates, but that only makes it better, because we can get it so easily.
Brian
ps... Brian ships internationaly as well!!!