I use my glowforge primarily to engrave wood. I’ve had good success and I am happy to have the glowforge as one of the tools in my shop. Recently I have started to experiment with epoxy resins. Mostly I use it along with various pigments to fill in engraved images in wood. It works really well with flowers and other designs to make it look like a painted image embedded in wood. Now I am thinking of epoxy resin on the wood surface. I am considering using my glowforge to engrave into the cured resin.
I have seen many examples in the glowforge community of beautiful work done with acrylic, but have found nothing working with epoxy resin.
My question is, Has anyone done this? Will the heat of the laser melt the resin? Do I need to be concerned with toxic fumes?
There have been a couple of past discussions on it, but I think the consensus was it is a better idea to use the epoxy after the fact. (Can’t remember why it’s not a good idea to laser it, but I’m thinking no.)
Epoxy is an aliphatic resin, strongly cross-linked carbon chains. A CO2 laser can’t cut it, and the resulting burned mess creates toxic fumes ( like cyanide! ). Items coated in Epoxy, or cast Epoxy resins must not be used in the laser cutter. ( see Fiberglass )
