Laser Engraving Info Thread

[pickdropper]

I get a lot of questions about laser engraving, so I think I am going to use this as a running thread to occasionally post information, misinformation, observations, obfuscation, and lessons learned.

One of the things that tends to surprise people most about laser engraving is how much the contrast varies depending on the color of enclosure.  While it is never as high contrast as painting or silk screening, it can be a cool look.  The downside is that it can be damn near invisible on the wrong color enclosure.

Take for example, the transparent gold finish from PPP.  It's a tremendously cool finish.  Unfortunately, you can barely see a laser etch on it.  For example:



This is actually taken from a favorable angle.  At most angles you can barely tell anything has happened to it.

So, do you need to throw it away?  Nope.  The solution can be to backfill.  In this case, I used an Industrial Sharpie.  I used it for one reason only: I can rub off the ink that sits above the etch.  Usually I use a paint pen, but that requires alcohol or a more agressive material like fine sandpaper.  The problem with etching powder coat is that it isn't very deep, so it's easy to remove paint from the backfill area while cleaning it up with alcohol. 

Here is the enclosure backfilled with ink or paint.  As you can see, the image now pops out:



Since I had two enclosures, I took a photo of one with backfill and one without next to each other to show the contrast difference:



More to come (probably).

[ncdb07]

I would like to share an experience I had with the one we have at work. If you use a lot of drop shadows in your artwork or text the laser engraver doesn't really understand and it turns it into a blob. Lesson learned the hard way, cost me an enclosure. It also helps to have a piece of something sacrificial to try the artwork out on.

Looking forward to more discussion as I don't get to use ours much.

Thanks,
ncdb07
Daniel