Engraving technique

[evansd2]

Things I have learned since:

Super manual engraving

I wanted to see if it would be faster to make my own engraving paths. Basically I made a series of concentric or spiral shapes and scored them to see if it would work as an engrave. The end result is that it does work, with mixed results. All settings are 500/15 on Baltic Birch. This is not a great setting for anything, it was just reasonably fast and showed what I was looking for. First: This is a traditional engrave. Nice and crisp. no hot spots, but slow. Engrave time: 7:00 [image] N…

and

Practical limits of LPI in Baltic Birch

I wondered what the upper limit was to the “resolution” of wood when it comes to engraving, so I tried to test it. Lessons learned: LPI matters. All of these pictures are the same speed and power, but higher LPI definitely yields better detail and darker contrast. 225 LPI: Note the muddy details, “Case” is almost illegible. [image] 370 LPI: Clearer and crisper with darker engraving. [image] Cleaning matters. Cleaning the smoke residue from the surface will make your details much m…

And beyond that, some meta learning: Baltic [ply in general too] doesn’t love going too deep or you hit the middle layer which can blow the fidelity of your whole engrave. The middle layer can have weird textures that can make your globe have knots in the ocean:

Dymaxion Globe Time

Finally got around to the Dymaxion globe. Scaling for BB was a pain but it all worked out. It was fully friction fit but I used tiny dabs of glue to make it bulletproof. [image]

Or it can cause your darks to “bottom out” and get too dark for the rest of the engrave (note the dark hair on left. Muddy and too dark):

Mucha more engraving

Two Alphonse Mucha pieces: [image] SVG for anyone who wants to give it a shot: moet_cut.zip (1.9 MB) Ok so I hit it with different lighting and it really pops: [Lighting matters] (sorry, uploading the video directly just wouldn’t work.)

Properly powered though, you can get good fidelity and grading:

One last engrave for the evening

I had a thought that Alphonse Mucha’s work would engrave well, he did lots of art nouveau posters. So I googled for one of his paintings: [image] A quick test, cropped and adjusted the curve to make it a decent candidate for engraving — maybe all of 5 minutes to get it set up: [image] [image] Not to get into settings too much here but, on Baltic, with “vary power” engrave mode. It’s amazing what you can do so quickly with the Glowforge.

and here:

Klimt engraving

Not much to say here but I’m pleased with how it turned out. [image] [image]

… and that’s just what I’ve posted. Search around, there is more than you will know what to do with.