I made some laser-cut coasters based on a nautical chart near my hometown of Haines, AK, and thought I’d share it with everyone. It’s printed in proofgrade maple plywood. I used Adobe Illustrator to create the mask and cut layers.
They’ve been pretty popular with friends and family members. I’m now looking for ideas for other nautical charts to try out
Pretty cool, especially like the way that it didn’t engrave very deep. Was this done with the Photo engrave settings? Also really dig that hexagonal shape you went with! Round is so square
I used the photo engrave settings, and selected the SD version, as it had the right speed and intensity. I also made sure the setting was mapping the gray scale value to laser intensity, rather than using a dithering algorithm. The design ended up looking too speckled or dirty when dithering was used.
Finally, I made sure to remove the masking tape off of the proofgrade material, so I could get even finer details out of the engrave.
I’ve always wondered why HD graphic uses convert to dots but we don’t really get answers like that unless @dan feels like dropping BTS info. It seems to contradict the SD setting with totally different behavior.