Favourite materials

Yes, I will share. Just didn’t get to the post. Brettunsvillage specializes in this type of scrap leather and have been most helpful. Great for small quantities. You can buy by weight. They also have some good information on leather processing, types, weights, thicknesses and other info that are important to know. Make sure you ask for vegetable tanned. They also have lots of different information on leather working supplies, buckles and studs, etc.
4Hides is a bulk supplier. I have been looking at getting a full hide from them. An investment, but the sample I got was just beautfiul. It’s a 2"x2" square that will be enough to do some test cuts on when I get my Glowforge.

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Brother came for Thanksgiving and brought me two new ‘found’ things to try with the Glowforge. 6 small rectangles of tin (about 3"x4") and two larger sized pieces of thick glass. The glass looks to be from a two way mirror, though you can see through it from either side, so I don’t know how that would have worked. I know metal can’t be cut, but will the GF do anything with either of these? Also, I dismantled two old backup hard drives and removed the disks, which are really beautifully shiny. (I sound like I’m being hypnotized…) I believe they are made from a glass or ceramic, right? Anyway, if you masked them, could anything be lasered on to them?

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The glass could be two way mirror (is that the right name, since it is used for 1 way viewing?), the way that such windows work is that you have to have one side VERY dark, and the other side well lit. It actually sends half of the light through, and reflects half of it.

So in the well lit room, half of that light coming back is WAY more than the half of the light coming through from the dark room, and it looks like just a mirror.

Change how the lights are set up in the rooms on either side, and you change the “direction” of the mirror.

Thank you…that makes perfect sense. I don’t know if ‘two way mirror’ is correct…seems like that’s what I’ve always heard. I suppose, by changing the lighting it could be used as a mirror on either side…thus ‘two way’?

Was thinking of laminating up some different leathers onto some Baltic Birch ply.

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So you know how on a half-dozen occasions someone’s said “don’t cut glass mirrors!” and I’ve said “those aren’t mirrors when you’re a 10600nm photon.” Or similar. Basically what you think of as a mirror, isn’t, to Glowforge wavelengths.

Well, hard drive disks are VERY VERY GOOD MIRRORS to Glowforge, and I would strongly recommend not putting them inside. Glowforge is designed so that it won’t cause too much havoc, but it’s not going to do anything good either.

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Dang, I just looked up the materials in a hard drive disk, then saw @dan 's post. Oh well, I’ll have to find some other use for my old hard drives.

Try to be patient, I am sure the whole concept of opaque to one wavelength and transparent to another has to be mind-boggling to a lot of people.

If folks can understand why a hole in the ozone layer is bad for our skin, they just might be able to get the idea. The science of the Glowforge is going to seduce so many folks to a deeper familiarity with optics than Blu-Ray DVD ever could because it’s on a whole different scale. All the discussion on the various properties of different types of lasers and interactions with materials has been so enlightening to me. Sorry for the pun.

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Thanks for that. The article was very interesting. I had been thinking that perhaps masking the disks would make the difference.

It’s actually a reasonable thought: if, for example, you put masking tape on it than the heat and force of the masking tape/soot/whatever ablating could bust through the mirrored surface and avoid much reflection.

I’d recommend playing with other materials though.

You could cut some kind of picture frame for them on the 'Forge, or cut/slot some panels of a box in such a way as to use them as inserts.

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I am headed back to Seattle with a carry-on box full of veneer and hardwood scraps from my father’s stash. He had a woodworking business for most of my youth, and like me is a bit of a pack rat.
I can’t wait to see what I can do with these small bits, and if it all works out well I might need to ship some boxes…

Kind of the feeling I got when my pal, foreman at a high end custom veneer company, told me I could dumpster dive whenever I wanted.

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That’s a great friend to have!

If we can’t engrave the hard drive discs, they do make an excellent starting point for a wind chime. They are quite musical when suspended & struck.

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Can we be friends? I’ll mail you empty boxes :wink:

I’ve also heard they make decent frisbees … Until you try and catch it

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Yes…they sound lovely. I have them in a mobile right now. The background in this room is too ‘busy’ and it’s difficult to see what one is looking at in a photo…but here are a couple of shots. The various reflections make it interesting. You can see my hand holding my phone in them.

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Love the alligator clips! Good idea!