Hi all! After an engrave of a greyscale bitmap on wood there is a lot of sticky residue leftover on the engraving. I know it’s from the transfer tape and it occurs on the proofgrade or wood that I have taped myself, but is there anyway to prevent this? It’s not easy to remove the residue and I can’t wash the wood.
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Greyscale images like photographs are generally best engraved without masking,
You can clean them up afterwards with alcohol or even hand sanitizer on a lint-free cloth, like a microfiber, or some (myself included) use “magic erasers”…
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So the residual adhesive happens when the power setting barely goes through the mask paper but leaves the adhesive. a slightly higher power should take care of that.
I agree with this^^ unless you are going to paint and need the mask. My personal preference to clean with is full strength household ammonia. It is the best solvent I have found, it won’t raise the grain and is much quicker than alcohol. It would deal with the adhesive too.
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I also need to do a cut on the engraving and thus the mask. Would you engrave, take out the piece, apply mask and put back in and cut? Or just remove the tackiness with a solvent?
This worked well thanks. I also need to cut. Do you think you would prefer to engrave, remove and add mask, and put back in to cut?
Another alternative when doing a vary power engraving is to set the minimum power to 10 rather than the default 0. That means even slightly off-white colors will get enough power to burn through the adhesive. With the defaults, those colors get some power but not enough to burn off the residue.
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This^^
There’s no one right answer, but I’ve never done that.
Increasing minimum power as suggested might work for you, it’s never given me satisfactory results and cleanup is not as easy as how I prefer to do it. That doesn’t make either way better. Part of the fun is experimenting.
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magic erasers, YES!
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