Aluminum or anodized aluminum?

[evansd2]

You won’t see anything on non-anodized aluminum, the laser can’t really engrave the metal.

If you engrave silver anodized aluminum, your contrast will be very low. You’re better off getting a colored anodization, black, red, etc. The laser blows the color away and you get silver engraves on the color background.

The chewbarka.com or theringlord.com for sourcing.

Search the forum for “anodized engraving” and you’ll find a lot of posts showing you what you can expect.

Here’s one I did.

A Pioneering aluminum engraving

Front: [image] Back: [image] 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…