Glowforge spark, aluminum

Can anyone help engraving on aluminum bottle openers for the spark. Cant find the material under selecting materials and we can not seem to adjust the settings correctly to make even a mark.

Thank you in advance.

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You can’t engrave aluminum but you can coat it with Cermark or several other things (including mustard maybe? Search the forum).

I like Cermark but it is expensive.

https://community.glowforge.com/search?q=Mustard

Make sure you test.

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Are the bottle openers anodized alumunim? If so, you can engrave away the coating and expose the underlying raw aluminum. You must make sure that the openers are within the 1/4" focus range of the Spark. I engrave anodized aluminum at 157/10/270.

Because we can only discuss setting for non proofgrade materials in the Beyond the Manual section of the forum I am moving this discussion to that category.

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Yeah we can’t even get to the underlying aluminum.

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What color is your aluminum?

I have a feeling that different colors will be easier or harder depending on how blue the color is. So things like blue or purple may be difficult to remove the color.

It’s mostly theoretical because I haven’t tried anything beyond purple in my aura and had bad luck with it.

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Can you share a photo of the item you are trying to engrave?

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If it’s anodized aluminum, then color is critical. It’s pretty much the same guidelines as colored acrylic.

I’ve made a lot of luggage tags out of AA on my Spark and have had great results as long as I steered away from “plain” and blues.

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