It’s 4 weeks since our Glowforge arrived.
In that period we’ve just experimented with the GF and different kind of materials.
Proofgrade material is much too expensive for us in The Netherlands, but luckily we have a lot of alternatives.
Mostly I’ve been using 3mm and 5mm birchwood triplex (not sure if it is an internationally known name). The 3mm works well for small pieces.
The first step is to determine the best settings for the material. I use a small SVG-file for that, that is having a part to cut, to score and a piece for engraving:
As a side effect, I now have a bucket full of BitCoins. Not everybody can say that
The next project was to make a lot of key chains for my wife before her next trade show:
I made 300 of them, using the 3mm birch triplex (cut: 150/55, score: 125/20, engrave: 350/30).
Next Friday we have our annual King’s Day with a fair and Mothers Day is in a few weeks so I created a dozen of these gifts and some for Fathers Day as well:
The transparent acrylic is 2mm, but that is too fragile, some broke while assembling. For the next batch, I’ll use 3mm. The colored inlays are already 3mm. The text “Papa” and “Mama” are opaque the smaller pieces are semi-transparent. The feet are 5mm birch triplex. I spend a lot of time making the pieces fit without glue. Eventually, I needed to make the colored pieces 0.3 mm bigger. Now I just press them together.
- 5 mm birch triplex (cut: 150/100, score: 125/20, engrave: 350/20)
- 2mm acrylic (cut: 140/70, score: 300/20, engrave: 300/20)
- 3mm acrylic (cut: 140/85, score: 300/30, engrave: 300/30)
We have two sons (7 and 9 years old) and they wanted some nice looking keychains. So I created these Pokemon Team keychains:
And this Fortnite keychain:
Their friends want one as well, so I’ll make some more and bring them to the fair as well.
When time permits I try to read the forum posts and a few days ago I read something about engraving tiles.
They look awesome. Today we went to see our niece who was born in January and we create a birth tile:
It was just a quick try with a tile I found in the attic. The post I read used different tiles with better results. Only the name and date were engraved. The rest is made with stamps and permanent ink.
For this tile, we use 250/100. We will experiment with other tiles more.
In the near future, I want to do something with leather and engrave photos.
When I have some results I’ll post them here again.
