What if I mounted a 110lb Red card stock to a white 200lb natural paper (such as letterpress stock). Would I be able to engrave through the red mounted red stock for a relief that is white?
Are they glued together already?
Might seem like a stupid question, but maybe cut it and then glue it? 
But maybe it would be possible with a lot of tweaking, high speed low power. But I think from NO experience at all, it might not be the best result.
Yeah, I’m thinking pre-glued because if it’s an intricate pattern, gluing after cutting could be tricky.
Gotcha.
I’m wondering now also how much glue would be left behind.
My guess it would be very tricky and likely impossible to get the laser power dialed in such that it only cut through the top layer of paper and didn’t leave scorch marks on the bottom layer. Better to cut the top layer by itself then glue them together.
Thank you everyone! Much appreciated help! I love the airplane invite GF made on the demo out of plastic. I want to create the same effect with paper but I think gluing post cutting is the only way to get this effect.
I would link to one of the videos with a sample of a paper crown saying Mia that I think Dan said in the Q&A video was 3 layers of paper. Someone will need to weigh in on whether that was post cut or pre. But that would just get my post marked as spam. So you’ll have to go look it up yourself.
Based on my (non-GF) laser experience, I can’t imagine a way that you could cut the top layer and not at the very least scorch the heck out of the bottom.
Especially if you also wanted to remove the glue. You would have to know the EXACT amount of energy needed to vaporize paper + Glue, and deliver ONLY that, and have it all absorbed perfectly by the initial paper and glue. Something which can only ever happen in pure theory, since you need so many things to be so perfect.
As a different approach, how about if you placed the red stock on a suitable cutting surface / guide that had some friction / stickyness to help prevent the small pieces from moving after cutting, then applied an adhesive to the white surface and gently applied it to the cut paper. I can see that if you used a surface that had a lip on one side as a guide and applied the sticky piece of paper with a roller it could work out quite well.
That could be pretty effective. You do need to remove the scrap red before you try to apply the white. Or burn away all red holes you want to generate (just cutting and removing will be far more efficient energy and laser life wise though)
Or use a sticky but slower drying adhesive and pick the scrap pieces off before the adhesive dries…?
funnily I had this sitting next to me. It was an experiment to see if exactly what you’re suggesting would work. It did. Engraved through the top layer into the second one.
Mia’s crown, on the other hand, was cut then assembled.
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What are we looking at dan? The discussion is about paper, so I assume that is black paper sitting on white paper. But the smudges on the white lettering feel like woodgrain to me.
Still an impressive etch, even if on wood. Very sharp lines.
Paper on paper. We figured out how to minimize the schmutz in later passes.
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That’s it. Now I’m upgrading. Love you guys for actually testing for me. Thanks!
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How did you minimize it?
Just experimentation of speed, power, and number of passes. I don’t recall the settings we used. We’ve changed so much since then that it’s not applicable anyway.
Hm…
If you can indeed blast away a single layer of paper, that would mean on projects with some real minor detail (or when you are just feeling lazy), you should be able to figure out a setting to etch away the covering sticker on your material.
Yes… you can just peel it off, but I have problems peeling off tiny stickers. So I imagine that if I figure out a setting to just vaporize the things… I can handle a few minutes longer in the machine (just have to make sure I run that last so the paper still blocks the majority of charring)
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Fascinating! Put that in the list of things to try.