Aluminum cuff bracelet

Played around with settings and think I finally found the sweet spot. I used Dry Molly Lube (sooo much cheaper, especially if practicing) instead of cermark and think it worked really well!

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It looks really nice! How did you deal with the roundness? Did you do it in sections? Alignment?

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The bracelet blanks come in a flat strip and you just bend afterwards. Super easy.

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Use anodized, and even the dry moly can be skipped!

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Really? I tried bare and it didnt do anything on my end.

You don’t have anodized aluminum… or at least not colored anodization.

With colored anodized aluminum you can blast the color away.

If you want to leave dark text, just invert your engrave, and it’ll leave the black behind.

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Nice! I’ve tried everything I can think of and never could get it to print anything at all on my bracelets…I’ll keep trying.

I wonder if the anodization would crack when bending the blanks post engrave.

If the bend is tight enough it will crack, but it has to be a pretty tight bend. Something like this I don’t think would be a problem. It’s a pretty shallow bend.

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Anodization isn’t a surface coating, it’s more like a dye that is into the aluminum. Lasering anodized aluminum isn’t like removing paint from a surface, it’s more like bleaching the colour.
So as @ben1 notes, shouldn’t be a problem to do moderate bends after lasering, since that won’t distort the aluminum the way a more extreme bend might.

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Anodization is a surface layer of aluminum oxide built up through electrolysis. It is harder than the underlying aluminum, which is why it will crack if bent too tightly. The color in the anodize layer is dye added after the anodizing process. This dye is what is ablated by the laser, revealing the underlying silver aluminum.

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Thanks, that’s a better description :slightly_smiling_face:

It might be the bracelet. Have you tried different ones from different places? I had a blank I could NOT get to mark at all, then I had others from other places that turned out beautifully.

hi what settings did you use for this?

Hello. Where did you purchase the flat blanks if you don’t mind me asking?

Since this is such an old thread and the OP hasn’t been around in a while, I’d say you might like to look at the reply I made earlier in the thread that led to this:

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