The origin of metal business cards

In the early 1990s, with the emergence of the metal plane vibration polishing process, people have further mastered the processing of copper materials, and unprecedented bright and exquisite copper crafts have appeared on the market. We condensed the advanced technology into On the thin copper sheet, this prompted the birth of the world’s first copper metal business card with modern process characteristics, namely the first generation of metal cards-copper cards.

Gold metal cards use polished thin copper sheets (0.2mm-0.8mm thick) as raw materials for manufacturing and processing. Compared with ordinary paper business cards, metal business cards are more expensive. Compared with the 0.8mm thick PVC membership cards at the time, most of the metal membership cards are only 0.35mm thick, and can even be 0.2mm thick. Not only the appearance is more high-end, but the hand feels better. exquisite.

However, at that time, the computer technology was backward, the corrosion processing technology was not advanced enough, and the typesetting and drafting work necessary for the corrosion processing was very complicated, and the corrosion technology could not be applied to the processing of thin copper sheets. The whole large material is divided into 10 small small cards. The size of the small cards is generally 85*54mm, 80*50mm, 76*44mm (this has also become the industry standard size and has been used until now), and then the computer-made artwork After the film is produced, the graphics and text are printed on the photosensitive screen printing screen through the printing technology, and then the screen printing technicians use the silk printing method to silk-print the graphics and text on the small card, and then electroplate a layer of gold or imitation gold material, so that the card has The golden appearance and concave-convex feel of graphics and text, and finally a layer of transparent lacquer oil (protective oil) is sprayed, and a metal card is done.

Since the shape of the card is determined by the mold used for stamping, the high mold opening cost limited the types of molds in the factory. Therefore, the gold cards at that time did not have personalized characteristics, not only fixed the size, but also had fewer lace types.