Glass engraving.... cutting?

I realize that the list of materials for cutting (as of now) excludes glass. What about really thin glass (e.g. 1/16 in thick) ?

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I believe you can engrave glass but I highly doubt you will be cutting it.

It sounds like they did those spice jars actually in the machine, and they looked pretty good. Some people have said that CO2 lasers don’t engrave on glass very well, so you would be better off using the laser to cut a stencil and then acid etch or sand blast, but if those sample jars are any indication, that’s good enough for my needs.

I’ve etched glass on other lasers – one trick is to place a thin coating of dishwashing soap over the area to be etched. The laser is essentially breaking/pulverizing the top layer of glass and the soap helps keep the process under control.

Agree that cutting is probably not possible.

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Question for those who have etched glass with a laser: is the etch deep enough to be used as a score line to break the glass along the line?

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Hmm… haven’t tried it joe, but the etching I’ve done is very, very shallow – perhaps a couple of thousandths of an inch (10-20 microns), so would probably need to be very thin glass for scoring. YMMV.

I’ve heard that you can use a CO2 laser to score glass for breaking, but haven’t tried it.

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I make stained glass so I’ll be sure to test this when my pre-order arrives.

Is the pro more likely to be able to score glass or would the 5w difference not make a major difference?

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Unlikely to make a major difference. But I did see a thin glass circle sitting on a workbench yesterday… @aeva might know something about that.

This article references a 35-watt laser being used to score for stained glass, so it seems that it should be possible.
https://www.epiloglaser.com/how-it-works/case-studies/laser-laceworks.htm

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Thanks for sharing this! It makes me incredibly excited.

Would it make sense to make multiple low power passes over the line, possibly moving the focus point down a fraction of a mm for each pass, to get a clean edged and deeper line that would work to break along? Not knowing a lot about how Lasers work, there may be factors that would prevent this from working as well as I think it should, so more experienced folks, please chime in!

If it works to score glass (I’ve not seen anything that contradicts this), next question is: can a 40/45W defocused laser introduce enough heat to one side of the scoring line to make it automatically break? Guess the scoring line need to go edge-to-edge.

Related: Laser etched stained glass panels

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