I want to make acrylic (or another weather resistant material) keychains ideally in gold. Does anyone have any suggestions of materials and laser settings?
Thanks!
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There are a couple of posts that can help you find this info. Check out # 1a and #6 in the FAQ:
#1a will help you search the forum to find other source recommendations.
#6 will help you figure out settings.
A caveat: If you have an Aura or Spark you’ll want to read #5a as well.
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Be prepared to do a lot of testing to find good settings. My experience with cutting acylic not from Glowforge is that the edges tend to “crackle” which is quite visible on mirror acrylic. for example. So ensure you have plenty of extra material to test with.
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There are quite a few pretty non-mirrored golds, like this one:
or
which has a different coloured core so if you want to put words or something on your keychain it’s really easy.
There’s also the option of using Rub’n’Buff which is coloured wax that dries solid. You can put it on wood and it’ll give it a really nice gold shine and a waterproof coating…but it’ll never be as waterproof as acrylic but unless you’re swimming with your keychain it does a surprisingly good job!
This was done intentionally “aged”, you can get a smooth coating easily.
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That’s a really good tip. It never crossed my mind that rub’n’buff would impact waterproofing.
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