Aww, I miss my xterra! Couldn’t justify bringing it across the pond. So much space for art materials/projects…
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Looks great. Thanks for sharing. Lots of slate roofs around here in New England. Shortly after I ordered my Glowforge, we was at an architectural salvage store and I grabbed 10 slate shingles. I can see lots of possibilities.
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We have a couple of pieces of slate from a 200-year-old roof that we use as cheese boards. We use a piece a very hard chalk to write the name of each cheese that we are serving. I have a feeling that our cheeseboard is about to get more ornate.
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Nice! Pet memorials is another possible use.
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Hard to see any problems with your test. That is amazing on a material that really doesn’t get used as a lasering medium.
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No. You can’t even feel the engrave above. It’s more of a bleaching effect. I used far more power on a piece of slate like tile my first week and was able to get a mark that you could get your fingernail into. But not much more.
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We have three of them. The wife uses hers as a portable art studio and camping vehiicle. A pickup with 4WD would work as well in these hills but can’t throw my upright bass in an open truck bed. The one I drive lost the transmission yesterday at about 210K. Praying that I can flush it as a quick fix. Otherwise, will be going online to find a reasonable 2015.
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Seems like we are going to have a near-limitless variety of materials to experiment with, once we all get our units of course 
That contrast seems much greater than what I got, do you recall the settings?
The settings, as you know, don’t mean a lot on the low end right now. Engrave 5%/335/270
This was the original drawing:
Real slate reacted a lot differently than another man made material on the left. The octagonal tile that I originally thought was slate had a dark, almost melting look to the lines with the same settings.
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I am jealous of your box of slate. I love the material so much, I restore old burial grounds that are filled with the wonderful slate stones and just took a class on how to carve slate in hopes of eventually learning to repair them. Slate is one of the first things besides wood I’m putting in my GF.
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Thanks.
That other material sure looks like slate. maybe be a ceramic. The mineral content must be a factor also, the slate I did @50% 335 340 isn’t nearly that white.
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I THINK the tile I found was slate, and it went pretty deep. They were rasters, though:
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/uploads/db6859/optimized/3X/a/a/aa31484243f6d3bf0f90b50c85d2a7468e0a3e74_1_666x500.jpg
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Yes. What I see on yours is consistent with what I saw on the octagonal tile when I used a much higher power. This pic was from a microscope. All of the pictures so far in this topic were raster engraves.
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Curious: are raster engraves more powerful than vector lines, even if the same power and speed settings are used?
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We may be having another misunderstanding with the terminology. When I say that I used line drawings, I was talking about my wife physically drawing pencil lines in the original artwork. That artwork was then engraved as a raster file. All of the pictures above including yours were engraved in a raster fashion, not following a vector path point to point. But to answer your question, I don’t know how the percentage of power translates. Right now, we know that the 1%-5% power selected for an engrave is significantly higher that those numbers would suggest. It seems to be artificially limited until the next update. Don’t know whether that translates to 5% or 50%. All of my scores go significantly deeper in all materials than engraves.
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That’s a great test!
@rpegg, If you could find, buy or make a slate cutter then you can have those really fancy beveled edges and cut down the slate to what ever size you need. I’ve included pics for a slate cutter and some slate that I cut to size before I carved and painted them.
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Chuckle
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