No worries 
If you look at the picture at the top with all the rubber dust crumbling into my hand, there’s a slight ridge around the whole stamp because i didn’t align the cut line perfectly, so I had to trim all that with the X-acto blade.
So I was trying my first rubber stamp and saw all the complaints about dust. Wanting to keep my GF clean, I thought I’d try a little different approach. I first cut out the block of rubber to the size of my stamp rather than having the GF create any more stinky rubber smell than necessary. Then I folded up a piece of cardstock into a makeshift tray. Then did the engraving. As you can see, the tray did a pretty good job of catching the dust. There wasn’t any noticeable dust by the front door (although my stamp is much smaller than the one above) …anyway, thought I’d share.
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Well that’s a clever thing! 
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that’s genius!
I’m not sure you can say that with a straight face.
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hey hey,
I’ve made a bunch of stamps since this post and if someone finds this useful, then hooray!
Process:
- Engrave (settings are only slightly tweaked)
- Speed: 220
- Power: 62
- Grayscale: Vary Power
- Min Power: 0
- LPI: 270 / LPCM: 106
-
Pause it to open GF & vacuum the rubber dust – I slap down a bunch of magnets to make sure I don’t move the rubber during the vacuuming and I use the bristle-brush attachment.
then -
CUT
- Speed: 300
- Power: FULL
NOTE: Since I only engrave slightly beyond the design I make sure the CUT line is inside an engraved area. This way, you can ramp the speed way up(and since the dust is vacuumed up, less SCORCH MARKS happen).
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When you put material on a tray, do you need to specify the material thickness to include the tray? Thanks for sharing. I will try this!
No, the top of the tray is y=0.
Yes, I included the thickness of my cardstock.
these settings worked amazing for me! thanks!
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thats awesome! how do you get those ramp up lines in there??? What program do you use? Im in Adobe Illustrator CC and “outer glow” seems to be the only option, but there’s very few options when it comes to how detailed the outer glow actually is!
the ramp up lines are from photoshop - if you don’t have that, GIMP is the free alternative and i’m sure someone has made a tutorial about Outer Glow in GIMP.
I do my stamps at 600dpi and here’s the settings I usually use - gotta fiddle with the range & size depending on your file’s dpi
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So, would I open my design file in Photoshop then? What type of file would I export/save it as in order to use in Photoshop to get those ramp up lines?
Okay, I have found the outer glow layer style window on Photoshop 2020… what a pain. Anyway, I’m there. NOW, the logo design is white, reversed, ready to go. I do the outer glow to fade the white into the black background, how do I go in and FILL the rest of the background??? Is that done in Photoshop or Illustrator? Is it just me or is this WAY more complicated than it should be…
i’m not sure what you mean by “fill in the rest of the background.” Can you send a screen shot?
Man I feel like I’m back to square one on figuring out how to make a damn stamp!!! I have my design, completed in Illustrator CC. Can someone make a list or video showing how they take their .ai file design and get it onto a rubber stamp?
it seems like with so many changes in the Adobe (dreadful program, crashes, menu changes and deletions, etc.)… it’s tough for someone to explain how to do something with their Adobe CS5 or 6 or 8 or whatever… Example: I use CC, the online version, the cloud. SO, things are different than when I previously used CS5. So some are saying just do A B then C but those options are NOWHERE to be found on Adobe CC. Frustrating.
Not sure if this is what you need, but…
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I…
I did not know it did this!!
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yeah i saw that a while back and got started on this whole process! but thats led me down this rabbit hole that i so badly want out of!