Bullet casing engraving

I have a friend who wants me to engrave bullet casings that have a green coating on them. She doesn’t know what the material is but she sent this picture. As you can see, it’s big based on the hand holding it on the bottom pic. If anyone has experience with it, can you shed some light? I don’t want to mess up their casing. She also can’t find the Amazon listing and neither can I.

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Most likely it is an enamel paint that can be safely engraved – but fitting it into your Glowforge might be the harder thing to do, considering you only have a 2" thickness clearance. Maybe look at smaller ones, preferably only the spent shells?

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If it was purchased on Amazon, it’s not a live round.

It’s 1.5" around, the listing states, so should fit fine.

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Thank you!!! That’s is super helpful!

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Can’t tell for sure since I can only download the the one picture but from the one with the the hand it looks like a 30 cal. shell. The casing is more than likely brass and the paint enamel.

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I engraved two of those (A10 Warthog) casings, two casings with screw-on caps (cigar cases), and two of the half-casings (shot glasses). Came out excellent. Just don’t get too big with the image/text as it will distort as it lasers down and curved edge.

I used 1000 speed, 60 power, and 225 LPI. Same settings I use for anodized aluminum business cards. To test, I lasered an inconspicuous dot/circle on the lower portion of the shell, just above the rim. Once I knew it made it through the paint/anodized area without issue, I put a Name, date, and farewell text on the center of the casing…3 total lines.

I didn’t take any pictures of them though (hindsight).

Here’s an amazon link to A-10 Warthog bullet. I purchased the clean black ones.

Amazon.com : a-10 warthog bullet

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Glad i saw this…it’s deer season and my son was just asking if i could laser a shell…i said i was sure i could but not one that hadn’t been fired!! :upside_down_face: He said he already knew that and rolled his eyes…

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Here is the final result! I learned that a BOLD font is best, slow it WAY down (100 speed) and keep it full power. I’m not mad at my first attempt. It would’ve been better to do it horizontally as far as doing a bigger font, but they wanted it in this format. They were very happy with it too! Thanks for your input.

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