Laser Cut Coaster and Wall Art

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Hello!

After the warm welcome I got from the community for sharing my SVG Library I had a couple of requests to see what I have done with them. So I was playing around and after hearing @nick07lee make a comment about making coasters I decided to try my hand at it with some scrap wood I had in the workshop.

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I went with the human transmutation symbol from the FMA series (since my wife is a huge fan). It turned out ok but the lettering is a little blurred due to how small the piece is (3"x3"). In the end though she was happy so I guess that is all that really matters… right?

I also made a piece while testing the alignment of my mirrors on my cutter since I have to manually adjust them.

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You can really tell in this piece that my mirrors are out of alignment as it cut much deeper in some places than in others, though some of the fading is due to my having sanded it a bit after which I know better than to do now.

Hope you all enjoy it, and thank you for the warm welcome!

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Can you sand it down to get rid of the blurring?

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The more that I sand it the more faint some of the lines become. I have since made progress by lowering the cutting speed and the laser strength so the laser stays in one place longer but at lower temperatures which seems to allow it to cut deeper without burning as much.

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what kind of laser do you have?? your focal length looks off to me

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Honestly I dont know… it is a cheap chinese one that I have to manually adjust every single part of it.

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I have tried the easy mask, can’t remember who posted about it on the board. Ordered a roll from Sign Warehouse. It did keep the smoke discoloration off the wood.
Does not cost a lot, if I remember the roll I purchased was 12" wide and 150’ long for about $50 us.

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That is not a bad idea! Thanks for the tip.

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I really like those. Maybe rather than just engraving, do a half cut pass to trace the outline of the design? or do that from the beginning?

Edit: actually I don’t think my thoughts are very useful, they look like they are already single lines. regardless I like the designs

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My machine is not that sophisticated, I can just do a cut or an engrave, I cant tell it to do half of something or even queue up different tasks.

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That’s OK, the hope is that the Glowforge will be lol :wink:

My most sophisticated piece of equipment before this laser that could do what you are doing was the cheap wood burning tool that is dusty (and lost) from lack of use

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That is my hope as well. I was pretty happy with my current laser cutter with all it short comings but when I saw the video for the Glowforge my first thought was it made my current laser cutter look like banging to rocks together, it is on a whole different level. Even if it delivers only half of what it has promised it will be a huge upgrade. I think the ability to position a cut with a real time view of the cutting bay alone makes it worth the money to me.

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Agreed