Can someone help -

I am trying to engrave on an aluminum master lock. Can someone help with settings? I’ve tried a couple options and one worked okay but not great. The problem being - I don’t know what setting they were and now when I go to engrave the laser doesn’t work. The machine goes through the motions but laser doesn’t work. I am new to this and easily discouraged. Can someone please help. Thank You

The tricky party with aluminum is that it must be anodized to engrave in a meaningful way. Do you have a pic of the lock?

How thick is the lock? If it’s more than 1/2”, you’ll need to engrave with the crumb tray out. I think what you’re talking about should be pretty doable, give us a bit more info and we can help for sure.

Also some more reading on aluminum:

Here’s the search I used:

https://community.glowforge.com/search?context=topic&context_id=31006&q=Anodized%20settings&skip_context=true

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looks like it is anodized.

I see people being happy with full speed, 100 power, and 340 LPI for anodized aluminum (from Anodized Aluminum dog tags )

and of course, make sure to measure the lock and enter the material height correctly

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Thank you. I’ll try it and let you know the results.

How thick is it?

Just to check: are you seeing the laser fire but not having an effect on the lock or is the laser not firing while the head moves around?

If the former, then @evansd2 and @jbv’s recommendations are good places to start and you can ignore me. If the latter, then the issue might be with your artwork - there are times when overlapping elements can cause it to look like something should engrave but nothing happens because something is “hiding” the main artwork and thus the laser doesn’t actually fire. Trying something simple or sharing a sample file here might help folks debug more.

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That’s what I thought of when she described the problem.

A “lock pic(k)?” :innocent:

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One other (expensive) option is Cermark. The cost is a barrier, but those marks won’t go away.