Laser and wine night

Made on a Glowforge
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Evening folks.

Had a laser and bottle of wine night with the wife. We have been talking about a craft fair comming up soon and dickering with dollar store items.

She got 4 small mirrors for 2 dollars . She found some images on the Google and we tried it out.

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The curly one was a straight from Google image to GFUI. Full power and half speed. Will have to look up.

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It is speckled , luckily that suits the image.

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Hard to see in the pic, but you can sort of see the lines from the raster. Full power and speed.

No masking either.

I am going to have to play with defocusing I think. Just to smooth things out. Would I defocus below the surface or above?

OK off to pass out…

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I really enjoy experimenting with materials. Sometimes you mail it right away, other times you have to sneak up on it.

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Very neat effect! Might have to play with some mirrors as well. :grinning:

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So – this may really sound dumb, but to etch a mirror, you are lasering the back of it, yes?

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Looks like the front because you can see the reflection.

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If glass is opaque to CO2 laser, should be able to laser front or back. Back would allow painting the etching a different color to have something showing boldly, such as a border design. Front would allow frosting like this that would actually also show in the reflection if viewed from an angle instead of straight on.

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So I was unsure last night, so a quick forum search found these:

So I took that as no problem go for it, I’ll use this as reference if machine breaks and I need a warranty repair…(probably wouldn’t work as an argument, but in my head after a glass with the wife it did).

So I figured from the above and a few other posts it wouldn’t break the machine. So the other question is, is it worth ruining material. Since each mirror was 0.50$ each that fell into my “shrug, screw it, what’s worse that can happen” range of experimentation.

When I get time I plan to dicker with the defocusing.

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Thanks!

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