Dispatches from the front (Pre-Release Report)

Messed around a bit playing with some glass tiles from Home Depot. They’re backed with a painted coating that I expected would ablate and leave the scored glass. I was interested in what kind of etching I could get with the glass.


Instead of ablating the paint it seemed to melt it into the etch. The view of the back was one I ran at 225 lpi for the etch at 1% power. I saw some striations in the black so bumped it to 5% and 340 lpi for the rest of the experiments.

Here’s the back of the 1%/225 version.

The last one is a close up of the front etch. I filled the etch with a paint pen and rubbed it off with a paper towel. I etched that through a wet paper towel as my “mask”. This stuff is .325" thick glass so probably didn’t need the paper towel but I do that with glass to keep it from overheating at the laser beam. The focus on the camera was so good it showed the pattern on the towel even when wet!


The face etch shows the shadow effect that comes from face etching acrylic too. It’s a bit distracting and does not add to the effect (personal aesthetic sense).

Oh, the “bacon” in the long tile was Comic Papyrus just for @henryhbk :grinning:

Still on the bed of the Glowforge are two projects. One is a living hinge eyeglass case from Obrary and the other is the Aztec Sunstone from @marmak3261’s Mexican holiday. I made one in my big laser so I wanted to see how the detail compared. It’s serving as a coaster in my office so I’ll post side by sides tomorrow. This one is very nice (Proofgrade maple ply at medium dark engrave).

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Well that’s just awesome. My wife thankfully keeps me from cleaning out the Home Depot sample materials every time I go, but I’m glad too see it might have been worth it to try.

Well done!

I really like the Comic Papyrus font. But I sense there’s a backstory to it that I’ve missed… :relaxed:

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:heart: :heart_decoration: :heart_decoration: :heart:

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I really like those… :smiley:

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The etchings are so good that I thought they were paper. Very impressive. :relaxed:

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type font into the forum search

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Lots of Papyrus (and Comic Sans) font conversation. But @henryhbk was doing something for Passover trying to use the Papyrus font and it wouldn’t engrave. So he had to punt. The Comic Papyrus font was created by someone as a hybrid between the 2 reviled (by designers :slight_smile:) fonts and I used it for the Bacon just to see if I’d have the same issues @henryhbk had with the straight Papyrus font.

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I think you wanted to reply to @MiniMouse

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Not that it wouldn’t engrave, I couldn’t even load the document into the design screen. Still working on a better diagnosis

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Huh. I have had issues with IE 11 but not Chrome or Edge.

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Not a browser issue, the GF app reported an error trying to render it. I’m doing a whole lot of experimentation right now.

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That is odd, since I was able to use the Papyrus font with no problem on my cedar grilling stick. Can’t help wondering if there is something going on with the font that has nothing to do with GF.

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If you see my post this morning, there is more detail after lots of trial and error to narrow it down.

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That’s what I was getting. It would pop the “rendering design” screen but no further. I thought it was a Surface RT issue. I was using Chrome & Edge on my Surface 3 without an issue. Tried IE11 just for grins and hit it again. I’m going to spend some time doing structured testing so I can get data to Support beyond what I sent them already.

Looking at your other post it seems we have different issues with similar symptoms. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Oh, no in this it truly fails with this:

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I was getting that for a bit yesterday. Rebooted everything and it went away :slightly_smiling_face:

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which is weird (and I would guess coincidental - or they made a change at their end and your reload got a fresh copy) since that is a server side error, not on your computer…

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