The automagic passthrough software ain’t out yet, so I had to align this the old fashioned, muggle-laser way: with visible overlaps. 18" x 24" x .040" pre-painted gloss white aluminum sign blank.
And the rub: I missed lunch while printing this. Must refill frozen costco chicken-bake stash.
Doing the same thing in vinyl on the plotter would have taken… well significantly less time. I could have cut it, weeded it, applied it, dug a 3’ hole and mounted it on a post in the time that this took to complete.
This, though, will never peel off, so that’s something.
P.S. I love the effect. And now I understand why I have a sheet of painted aluminum in the garage. I must have seen it mentioned on the forum as a laserable material and acquired it for eventual use.
First, GREAT to see your work–I’ve been looking forward to that as long as I’ve “known” you on the forum. Second, what did you do during the 4 hours? Did you stay in the room and babysit it? Were you actually watching the lasering process to make sure the paint didn’t light up?
What do people do when they’re doing a really long job?
This is not my art, it’s historical government propaganda, from the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services, Washington DC. One of my personal projects recently has been playing with vectorizing and remixing Gov’t propaganda and WPA posters that have all been released into the public domain in the last ten years, but often I find that I want original versions also. The hand-lettering is always wonderful, the subjects are interesting to say the least, and the scope and mission of these posters compared to current gov’t propaganda is… something that I think about.
So the four hours was total engraving time. It was split into three 1:20 operations, using the passthrough, since I couldn’t fit the whole 18x24 sheet into the bed. I stood over it just watching for the first half hour or so, and then once I was confident that there were no sparks, flames, anything at all coming off, I went about doing some organizing and cleaning. I didn’t leave the room, and stopped to go look at it every 5 or 10 minutes. Mind you, I have used a lot of this material, and have blasted it with propane torches and my 1000° heat gun. I was not really worried that it would have any potential to flare.
it’s a real poster, that was not meant to be ironic at the time of printing (sometime between 1936-1943)
but on the other hand, love the results 
And like you said, the end product won’t be peeling, or even fading that much with time.
