Getting ready for some fabric tests

I met today with the company that does my screen printing and embroidery and I do their decal and heat transfer printing. As I was leaving, the brought me to their scrap pile and kept asking “what would the laser do to this material?” to which I kept responding “I don’t know but I can find out.” I walked out with this armful of materials. My best hope is for the scrap of fleece at the bottom left of the photo but it will be fun experimenting to see what I can come up with. I set low expectations especially for the hat. They said they can’t come up with any other way to decorate it so it’s worth a shot.

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I wonder how putting the beam quite a bit of focus but at higher power would react… maybe kind of an embossed appearance?

My fabric experience has been that you need very little power before you start affecting the integrity of the fabric.

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I have plenty of material to experiment with so I can try all kinds of combinations. Thanks for the suggested starting point.

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Another thread popped up the other day about this, btw.

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Thanks! Between a 3 day power outage and then being sick for a week and a half and then trying to catch up from all of that, I have fallen helplessly behind on the forums.

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Lightweight ripstop nylon, like for parachutes, cuts at 1% power, 500 speed. The challenge is keeping it down in the breezy internal environment. The cut I did was originally an experiment to make solids more flexible. This made for “fluffy” nylon. Fun!

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These came out pretty good for first tests. The shirt looks a little better than the photo suggests. The fleece looks the worst but that’s mostly because it was my first tests. I couldn’t do anything with the hat.

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