My 
shipment doesn’t get here until tomorrow so I started with the keychain measue on some 1/16" cardboard. Then I whipped up a template to see the tradeoff of speed vs power on different materials (speed 100 was making tons of smoke so I removed it).
I tried the founders ruler using settings for medium draftboard and it cut nicely but very deep engraves and it made a lot of smoke. I need to start working with masking materials.
Oh, I also wanted to use scoring to get cleaner fonts on technical stuff like this. A little googling turned up a cool Illustrator script that generates nice single-stroke text:
http://www.typophile.com/comment/429344#comment-429344
monolinetext.v1.0.zip (3.7 KB)
Looks like you’re off to a great start!
No materials yet? No worries. Leaves cut nicely. Rocks engrave well. Bananas engrave nicely without your tray. Paper cuts really well. Grains of rice engrave well if you can hit them. Denim engraves well, just lay it nice and flat. Phone cases are perfect targets. Corks engrave beautifully. I even engraved a rat skull, if you happen to have one of those laying around.
These are just some of the weird everyday materials people have posted that come to mind. There are lots more, congrats on your machine, it’s a ton of fun. 
Hey, thanks! This could be quite useful.
a cool Illustrator script that generates nice single-stroke tex
I’ve been looking for something like this for ages! Kudo’s to your google-fu!
