How can I be so thick? (Pro-Tube?)

Is the quality or thickness of the face wood noticing different between the two lowes sheets? This makes me feel better about wanting to spend a little extra not to have to worry about it and getting my money’s worth

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Face wood veneers are graded so tend to be pretty consistent in my experience with plywood. What changes are the inner plies and the glues used. The glues especially can screw things up in terms of cutability between different samples.

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Looks Great!!!

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This is hilarious.

Trust me, I suffered through a lot of plywood. (Now there’s a T-shirt…)

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I have worked in plywood my whole life and I can tell you there are major variations, even high grade ply can have some weird stuff in them. We have come across voids filled with bondo and other resins. Have also found hair, plastic fiber, lead and bits of steel. Also just plain voids that I would think could be a fire hazard!!

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Working on other stuff so this is not yet worthy of a new topic… Quick test of an engrave on standard Lowes ceramic tile.

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Woohoo!

Both Home Depot and Lowes sell odd-lots (even one-offs) of various tile and tile samples. While you’re there, also check out the garden supply center for slate - sometimes you can score their broken ones for free if the dept manager is around.

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Have a whole box of black roofing slate the wife wants me to try. From the results of other tests I’m not confident it will have enough contrast. The black shiny tile seems to work pretty well because of the difference between shiny and dull surface. Tried it on a dull black tile and it only pops at specific angles. Of course still testing.

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You might want to try a topic that is just offcuts, trial runs, errors or little things and make it your catch all for these interesting posts and just keep slapping stuff in it. You know how one thing which is totally boring and insignificant on this forum can mushroom into a major industry!

That said, I drop in things all the time in other posts if they have the remotest possibility of sustaining the topic. Kind of helps to keep people reading through everything to find the gems.

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Ohhhh…OHHH! THIS is what I’ve been thinking about doing and I’m so excited to see this! Thank you. I love the idea of being able to engrave/mark/score on ceramic tiles. Yippeee!

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Haven’t tried black slate.

Gray is good because the etch is white. What’s also cool is making it a part of a desktop or deck/garden fountain because the water can highlight the etch. I gave some thought to a timer controlled mister so the slate could dry off in between mistings but I left it out on the deck and my pump froze this winter so I’ll have to try it again this summer :smile: Started with a 555 chip but I’m thinking arduino control might be better than a simple timer circuit.

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Quite cool!

Can I ask a potentially super dumb question? How does one center the design to the tile pre-forge?

In my head I create a layer the size of the item, center the image I want to forge in my software, line my entire shape over the camera shot, set that layer to do absolutely nothing, then forge. Did I over-engineer that?

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Nope that’s a good way. A box the size of the tile but is either 0 width or not sent to the laser is still part of the design. My big laser lets me adjust the head’s starting position and hit a test button that will send the head around the material starting from my zero point in a rectangle that will encompass the full engrave even without a bounding box. That’s a little more kludgy and trial & error but it eliminates the possibility I forget to turn the bounding box line off and it tries to cut it :slight_smile:

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Regarding exact positioning for viewing, I learned that the bottom line is it must please the eye. Not often, but I have seen instances where because of viewing angle, it just didn’t look right centered.
I also learned that the eye is remarkably accurate. looking at a picture on a wall, when you think maybe it is tilted, you could measure it and find you detected a difference of a couple of hundredths on an inch from across the room.
If it doesn’t draw the eye, don’t get anal about it. :+1:

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Darn. Thanks for confirming! I was hoping the GFUI would edge-detect and allow a centering within the GFUI. That’d guarantee the center rather than eyeballing the design over the camera image.

@dan is this idea hopper-worthy? Also, maybe consider setting up a @hopper account so we can just send things straight to it? Save you the effort?

Oh, sure! There’re all sorts of guidelines for “centering” when you’re not really centering. But I may want to absolutely horizontally center something then eyeball the vertical, for example. Being able to do that definitely has its uses.

  • Tom
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That’s about it. You have to have the tile square in the bed (the whole jig, 0,0, registration mark thing!!) Then have a box outline in the design file of a particular color, doesn’t have to be a separate layer. That will import as a specific operation. Align your image over the tile. then choose ignore that step and process the design.

At the moment you can’t rotate rastered images or bitmaps that you bring into the workspace, but you can a pure vector that you later can mark as an engrave.

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Good to know! Thanks!

What the WHAT?! So whataya do… rotate the object and take a new pic until it all lines up?!

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Two camps of people on this one. One: It drives OCD people nuts. Two: it’s fairly common to weight in framing/matting pictures because of perception.

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Dammit @rpegg! Yes it is! People want to see stuff like that! :smirk:

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I just eyeballed that one but I always use a masking on everything, so you could easily mark the position or center of the tile on the masking. If you did the design yourself you might place an X at the center of your design with a different color and when it comes time to cut, just assign “Ignore” to the X.

A little bit of a pain but it gets very good accuracy when you zoom in.

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