A Pioneering aluminum engraving

Front:

Back:

Simple thing, but I love it. The text is all hershey generated in Inkscape, so it’s single stroke vectors. It’s a modified version of the explanation on Wikipedia.

The Pioneer plaque SVG is also available on wiki.

Interestingly, something got out of whack with the GF, and you can see that some text isn’t aligned properly. That’s definitely in the machine and not the art, the art is perfectly aligned. I don’t know if the motors are missing steps or what, but something’s amiss. I’ll go check my belts and rails.

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Hope you find the problem … definitely an awesome engrave otherwise.

“We are here.”

Great start! I can’t wait to see the rest of your probe replica! :grinning:

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I had some shifts like this once or twice on an engrave of some thin aluminum. I did not use any hold downs. After thinking about it a while, and observing some movement of lighter materials (that i did attempt to hold down) i decided to use magnets or some other means to secure the work piece to the table for small engraves. I have not seen any artifacts or distortion since.

Were you using any work holding?

Can i ask where you sourced the anodized aluminum from, and how you cut it so cleanly?

EDIT - is the piece bent/raised a little about 1/4 of the way in from the left? The photo makes it look a little wavy - this could easily result in some distortion.

Yup, doublesided tape, it didn’t move at all.

Buddy of mine gave me some samples, but they’re from theringlord. (google them)

I didn’t cut anything, they are biz card blanks.

Nope, dead flat. This really does seem like the y position got lost in the middle of the engrave. The way it engraved was haphazard, it jumped all over the place, one letter at a time. I was running at a medium speed, in order to try to prevent this. I’ll give it another shot at even slower speeds and see if I get the same result.

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