Cutting titanium or niobium

[evansd2]

There’s been some experimentation with titanium that was surprising— it appeared to produce colors and even remove some material:

WHAAAT!? You can mark uncoated titanium!?

I did a little testing to see what colors I could make. Here’s a photo of a few test patterns… [image] Mostly blues and yellows. I guess you could call a couple of them “red-ish”. All of these were done with the laser focused on the surface of the metal at 1000 lines per inch. I’d like to find a piece of titanium with a more uniform surface before doing any more testing. Somewhere in the testing something interesting happened. I didn’t notice it at the time, but it seems that the laser actual…

I’m not sure if it’s ever been reproduced… a search of titanium here will yield other discussions, you might want to dig through them and see what you find.