I was in a creative funk for most of 2022 and 2023, not designing much of anything new for the laser aside from making retail displays to help my wife get her glass art business going.
Over the winter I found a new hobby in collecting interesting artifacts from auctions and estate sales and displaying them in a lighted glass cabinet in our house. I’ve indulged my bad habit of monetizing all hobbies by starting to use the ol’ Glowforge Pro and a sublimation printer to make new displays for some of these things to see if I can sell them as gifts for other science and history nerds.
This is how they’re looking so far. Most of it is made with Proofgrade acrylic and maple plywood, a lot of which I got at under $8/sheet from Joanns stores going out of business. I cleaned them out wherever I found the 12x20" wood sheets still for sale. The full color prints use Chromaluxe Maple which is maple ply that has a clear sublimation coating already applied.
I’m not 100% sold on these designs and might start over this summer when I hopefully pick up my first UV printer to be able to print directly on wood and acrylic.
We brought a few “widow’s mites” home from a recent trip to Israel, and I haven’t known what to do with them. Displaying them like this would be really cool. Thanks for the inspiration!
It is! The best-preserved and most-studied K–Pg boundary section is in Bidart, France which is where this sample comes from. I had a bigger chunk of the clay and broke it up into smaller pieces for the displays.
These are great! I have a project that could use some label plaques like that (can’t tell if they’re brass or just brass-looking). I did some experiments with marking spray but got distracted and set it aside.
The plaques are made with Rowmark FlexiBrass. It’s a brushed metal foil on .02" thin black acrylic, so just a quick engrave and cut. I buy it with 3M adhesive pre-applied to the back from Johnson Plastics.
Houston Acrylic also just started carrying Rowmark products. I already order most of my acrylic from them so I’ll probably restock this from them in the future.
@dan84, In my bucket list is a visit to one of the relatively accessible few places in the US where you can actually see the K-Pg boundary which is in Trinidad Lake State Park, CO
Another is in the middle of nowhere in Big Bend National Park, TX.
For those interested in learning about the K-Pg boundary:
