I guess I am kind of late to the forms on here, so I have been doing some reading of the older posts. I have seen that a few people have asked about mirrors, glass, and metal. I understand that with the GF we won’t be able to cut metal or mirrors. I have been looking into Cermark and the different forms it comes in. Would you be able to “engrave” on a mirror if you coated it first with one of the products made by Cermark? As an example, if you wanted to put flowers in the one corner of a mirror. Im assuming that it would have the same effect on a mirror as it does on metal, but I have never used Cermark before.
As for glass, I know it can be “engraved”, but has it been said if the GF will be able to cut glass? Say if you went to Hobby Lobby to get some colored glass to cut shapes out, and then use it in stained glass or something like that.
A earlier topic “Glass engraving… cutting?” discussed this. I believe there was a link with an example in the discussion. Not sure what the consensus was. The search tool is useful to find other related topics.
You won’t be able to cut through glass, but you can score & snap it in a similar manner to what you can do by hand. @Kusmeroglu and I were experimenting with this at last week’s Laser Thursday - we were able to get a pretty clean break with a straight line, but are still fine-tuning the process for curves.
@aeva thanks for the updated info on the cutting of glass. I would have been surprised if you would have been able to cut it. Sounds like I will have some work ahead of myself on seeing if I can get it do a good job on odd shapes.
Yes, I’m working on it - wanted to do one more experiment before I posted it up. It was normal mirror glass - the 12x12 mirror tiles that you can get at the hardware store.
Glass can easily be fractured due to temperature variations within the glass itself, so working with glass in a laser can be a bit tricky. I’ve seen lots of broken glass around the shop from people trying to etch glass. This is not to say it can’'t be done, but personally, I’ve found it far easier to create an adhesive template, applied to the glass and then use a sand blaster to etch the glass surface.
With more people starting to get to play around with it, with laser Thursdays, and some people/places getting theres in December, I’m looking forward to hearing more from people and there hands on usage with it.
