I’m presenting at an upcoming conference, and I wanted some giveaways for attendees. I ordered some generic USB thumb drives on Ebay and decided to engrave my logo using the Glowforge. I made a jig and voila! It was surprisingly easy. And yes, the thumb drive still works - I checked. 
Here are the settings I used:
nice! i’ve done some wood thumb drives before, but not the anodized ones.
What material are they made of? Anodized aluminum? or some type of acrylic? (I was nervous for you at first, because PVC popped into my head initially.)
Those are anodized aluminum by the appearance of the engrave, though they may also be painted.
These turned out great!
Good job! I’m sure your presentation will go very well.
@planning17 great end result. I´m sure your customers will keep your brand in mind every time they use the USB drive.
Do you mind sharing the source of your generic USB thumb drives, please?
They’re aluminum. Can’t say for sure if they’re anodized or painted, however the blue color is fairly durable and not thick like paint. So I suspect they’re anodized.
These are the drives I used: Lot 10 USB Flash Drive Key Shaped Thumb Drives Metal Memory Sticks Bulk Pack | eBay
They ship from China, so take a week or so to get to the US. So far, no issues with any of the drives.
It appears you’re using a jig to lay them out.
A suggestion:
Duplicate and layout each of the engraves in the proper places for the jig, then rasterize it into one big image. Instead on 16 front to back engraves, it’ll be 1 wide front to back movement.
Should see some significant time savings.
I hope you have a great presentation. That’s a nice giveaway.
bookmark worthy; thank you!
This is great advice. I knew my approach here wasn’t super-efficient. Was happy to simply get it working, however if I was doing tons of these, efficiency would be important. Thanks.
FYI - I did another batch of these, and the anodization wasn’t exactly the same thickness (same vendor, same product). They still turned out well, but had I tested first, I might have bumped the power a bit.
remember, if you don’t move them, you can run a second pass in the exact same place.
