Engrave on Stainless Steel

Used Ceremark on the blade - came out really well. I was a little off positioning the print on one side though. The scales (handle) I made with a Nomad883 CNC mill out of layered bamboo. The final pic is polished starting from 240 grit down to 3000 grit sandpaper and then 0000 steel wool and then sealed with oil.

IMG_1124|133x500

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Very Nice!

It is always nice to see your work. Love the handle.

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Nice! Haven’t seen to many handles made out of layered bamboo… fantastic idea!! The engraving on the blade looks really good as well. Now I need to fire up my forge and start making knives again just to I can use the GF!

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Very cool!

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For anyone looking at this post that may be confused, the operation here isn’t engraving. The settings used in the Glowforge are labelled engraving, but the actual process the laser is doing is bonding a marking material to the underlying metal surface.

Since my original wording seems to have been confusing, here is the simplified version:
The Glowforge laser doesn’t have the power to remove material from most metals.
Copper alloys will reflect the laser beam back into the laser head. The more copper is included in the alloy the more reflection there will be. Nickel silver is the lowest commonly used percentage of copper at 60%. Other copper alloys include brass, bronze. Other metals may contain copper as well, though most are low percentage alloying amounts. Rose gold has a higher included copper percentage at 25% copper to 75% gold.
Reflecting the laser back into the head will cause damage.
A shiny surface will reflect to some degree, but the laser is high-band infrared so materials looking reflective isn’t a good indication of IR reflectivity.
Using a marking compound should be safe as the compound is the absorbing material, but any gaps in the compound may allow the laser to reflect from a laser-reflective surface.
Users should take care when using any copper alloy to ensure they are doing so safely.

Original:
The Glowforge doesn’t have enough power to effectively engrave, that is remove material, most metals and copper alloys will reflect the beam back into the machine and damage it.

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Not quite. Most metals are not very reflective of the 10600nm light beam. Copper however is. In fact polished copper can be 96% reflective and can be (& has been) used as mirrors in CO2 lasers.

Other metals not so much. That’s why no one sweats doing aluminum, brass, mild or stainless steel. They may look shiny & reflective but only because your eyes aren’t working on the same light wave as the laser.

What I said is correct. The Glowforge doesn’t have the power to mark most metals. And, copper alloys are IR reflective and can damage the laser.

I wasn’t disagreeing with that entirely. I was disagreeing with the part I quoted:

The key part being most metals and will reflect back because that’s simply wrong - most metals are fine. Nor is it correct to state that they will reflect although copper may.

I could have further parsed it relative to how much copper in a copper alloy is necessary to be reflective (for instance brass, an alloy of copper & zinc, is generally not a problem hence you’ll find Cermark sold to mark it).

It was the gross generalization I was trying to clarify for people who didn’t know enough to discount the hyperbole in the broad statement you made.

I wasn’t originally going to comment because I don’t really care if someone limits themselves but I didn’t want the misinformation becoming “truth” to others whose only sin was believing something they read here. Now they can see there is a disagreement and do their own research if they want to determine which statement is correct and which is erroneous.

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You aren’t reading the sentence correctly. You also took your partial quote in such a way as to remove the context.
You are reading it as if the second comma was a period, which changes the meaning of what I wrote.

Of course. I’ll try to work harder on my English comprehension skills (while continuing to use Cermark on steel, stainless steel and brass).

:man_shrugging:

Thank you - I had it sitting by the machine handily almost the right size. I am pretty pleased with how it turned out!

Thank you for clarifying the process and why ceremark was used - always enjoy reading a good back and forth :slight_smile:

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Looks great, and the handle is simply beautiful!

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Thank you!

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