Adventures In Laser Engraving

fuzz092888

fuzz092888

Audioholic Warlord
So I wasn't sure where to put this thread, so I figured I'd play it safe. As some of you saw I bought a laser engraver a little while ago and I've been messing around with it. Tons and tons and tons of trial and error later, along with reading forums, asking questions to experienced users, and investing in photoshop I finally have some half decent results.







 
adk highlander

adk highlander

Sith Lord
Cool stuff. I just got a knock off Ridge wallet and was thinking it would be cool to engrave something on the back of it. What materials does it work on?
 
fuzz092888

fuzz092888

Audioholic Warlord
Cool stuff. I just got a knock off Ridge wallet and was thinking it would be cool to engrave something on the back of it. What materials does it work on?
Wood/plywood, leather, acrylic, fabric, softer metals. Basically anything that can fit under the laser it can engrave, however it can only cut through certain materials at certain thicknesses. The phone case in the pictures above is an example of what it can do on leather. However, that was my first attempt at leather so I'm sure I can do better with a little more practice.
 
mtrycrafts

mtrycrafts

Seriously, I have no life.
Looks great.
But, you should have left enough border on those ply engravings for framing. I think it is that good.
Didn't know you have this machine. How large of an area and how expensive are these?

Yes, good place to post it.
 
TheWarrior

TheWarrior

Audioholic Ninja
I haven't used one since 2008, they sure have come a long way with the shading on wood! Beautiful!
 
fuzz092888

fuzz092888

Audioholic Warlord
Looks great.
But, you should have left enough border on those ply engravings for framing. I think it is that good.
Didn't know you have this machine. How large of an area and how expensive are these?

Yes, good place to post it.
Those actually aren't ply, that's solid maple. It's thin, but it's maple. It was part of the project pack that came with the engraver to get you going as soon as it arrives. I'll definitely be leaving space for framing in the future. Fow now I've made so many engravings trying to figure the thing out that I'm never quite sure it's going to come out as intended. Lately, I'm getting better and can better predict, but it's still not perfect. Especially from material to material.

glowforge.com for pricing and sizing. There are 3 models, $2000, $4000, and $6000. The $6000 one offers a passthrough for longer pieces as well. The two major drawbacks of this particular laser engraver/cutter compared to others is that there are no z-axis adjustments so you are extremely depth limited and you can only use their software in order to run it, which gives you less control over exactly what the laser does. The upside, is that it is plug and play with basically no learning curve to start cutting and engraving (with a few caveats).

I haven't used one since 2008, they sure have come a long way with the shading on wood! Beautiful!
Slowly but surely it's getting there. I was hemming and hawing between this one and another one. The other one offered a heck of a lot more functionality, but it had a major learning curve. The other big difference was the other one did not offer variable power single pass. That more than anything steered me to this one for what I'm doing.
 
Alex2507

Alex2507

Audioholic Slumlord
I thought it was a hand held deal. Notice I didn't say hand job. I thought, 'wow, this kid's good.'

You suck. :D
 
fuzz092888

fuzz092888

Audioholic Warlord
Interesting results with pics that had a black background



 
KEW

KEW

Audioholic Overlord
I know a guy who gave his girlfriend an iPhone with the lyrics from her favorite song etched in the back. Pretty sure he got laid that night... maybe more than once! Just sayin'!
 
adk highlander

adk highlander

Sith Lord
I know a guy who gave his girlfriend an iPhone with the lyrics from her favorite song etched in the back. Pretty sure he got laid that night... maybe more than once! Just sayin'!
Oh no. Star Wars stuff will always get you laid first. Just ahead of Star Trek. ;)
 
fuzz092888

fuzz092888

Audioholic Warlord
Here's one of my principal. It didn't come out great and was actually a second attempt at printing this picture. The first one came out better, but I wanted to up the power and see if I could get more detail out of hisbeard. I think I upped it too much and might try to print one more time.

 
fuzz092888

fuzz092888

Audioholic Warlord








Hand drawing by the art teacher at my school that she scanned and I engraved



Same image, different material

















 
slipperybidness

slipperybidness

Audioholic Warlord
Just a question/suggestion. Have you tried various filters on the image before generating the files for the engraver?

Seems like you have been doing a lot of hardware and settings tweaks, but don't forget that there may be particular image software tricks and configs that will make the image more ideal for the engraving file generation.
 
fuzz092888

fuzz092888

Audioholic Warlord
Just a question/suggestion. Have you tried various filters on the image before generating the files for the engraver?

Seems like you have been doing a lot of hardware and settings tweaks, but don't forget that there may be particular image software tricks and configs that will make the image more ideal for the engraving file generation.
Yup I've been on photoshop working with the photos beforehand. For most of the non photo images it doesn't take much, but the actual photos of people are a royal pain because of image quality. Any engraving that doesn't come out like the baby one is mostly due to resolution. Some of them I spent a couple hours tweaking and there just wasn't enough there to get the engraving to come out better.
 
slipperybidness

slipperybidness

Audioholic Warlord
Yup I've been on photoshop working with the photos beforehand. For most of the non photo images it doesn't take much, but the actual photos of people are a royal pain because of image quality. Any engraving that doesn't come out like the baby one is mostly due to resolution. Some of them I spent a couple hours tweaking and there just wasn't enough there to get the engraving to come out better.
OK, in that case, you could try to optimize from the other direction.

If you could find some files that have already been optimized for laser engraving (ideally for your specific model engraver), then you could print those and have a good baseline for hardware tweaks to optimize the hardware.

You may already be doing this, but just a suggestion.
 
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