I am making a series of small round boxes and have been playing around with different woods to use. Some are good. Some are not! Here are a few of the results:
This is a piece I did on 1/4" Bloodwood. I used low settings with a single path and wiped it clean with a baby wipe. I think a second pass on this wood would make for a killer engrave. The grain of the wood really adds some great texture and character.
Thanks for looking! I have yet to get good about writing down all of the particular settings I am using. Gotta work on that. lol
I played with 3D engrave for a spell. So much so (about 2 dozen or more) that I had to clean the machine twice before I moved on to other things.
A good resource is available at Home Depot in their wood floor department. The little 4x4 samples are free and I had been getting a few samples each time I went.
Just make sure you are getting the wooden floor samples, not one of the vinyls.
Not a great candidate for finished projects, but a free resource to allow playing with your files until they look good enough to put the good wood under the laser. (NOTE: Old wooden fan blades are also nice to work with - MDF centers on the wood ones can make them harder to cut than real wood, but they are also another freebie if you have been like me and replaced fans over the years and hoarded the blades)
It’s nice to have the settings, but we’re only supposed to talk about non-PG settings in Beyond the Manual. For some reason, some people don’t like to put their posts there (even though it’s my favorite section!), so if you share their feelings you can just post your settings there with the type of wood you used them on, and then link to them from here.
My experience with bloodwood was many years ago that someone had a piece that was a shelf in his boat that had to come out as the space was renovated. It was likely many years old so that probably affected my experience.
The wood that I got was a dark brown but fresh cuts were gorgeous and nearly as red as fresh blood, but after a week or so the new cuts were the color of actual blood that was that old which I found very disappointing.
Perhaps others here would have a way to keep the fresh color fresh.