Hi there, I was hoping to use my glowforge to engrave a 14k gold pendant for a necklace on both sides. This is a personal project for engraving my mother’s handwriting on necklace pendants for my sister and myself.
After reading reviews I also purchased the Cermark metal spray. I am still hesitant to get started on creating the 2 pendants since I’d really like to get some more clear direction on settings/ if this is the best option for engraving handwriting onto the gold pendants. The size specifications for the pendants are: 18x21mm, 0.027 thickness
Thank you for your time!
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I’m not sure Cermark (LMM6000 for metals) is going to work on gold. I’ve seen a lot of reports of it failing on jewelry forums for both gold & sterling silver.
Cermark has a new version (Cermark Ultra) that is advertised to provide a number of improvements over LMM6000 including working on more materials. But I think it’s one of those things you’ll have to ask the manufacturer about before you spend a lot of time and money.
Also, gold has a high reflectance to CO2 laser wavelengths which complicates the marking process (and 18K has a fair amount of copper in it which is almost perfectly reflective).
Either a fiber laser or traditional CNC routers with a diamond bit are probably better options.
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Welcome, I hope you can work this out, sounds like a wonderful project.
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Since you used the term engrave a few times in your post, I just wanted to clarify that even though you mentioned using Cermark, if it did work, it would only mark the metal…and mark it in black… not actually engrave it. You might be better off seeing what a jeweler might charge to do that for you. It’s really a lovely idea.
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This question is outside our team’s scope. I’ve moved it to the Beyond the Manual so the discussion can continue there.
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