MacBook Etching

[steve_grain]

No-Math Focus Ruler

Leveraging the recently-released Set Focus tool, I’ve designed a tool to help place materials when the crumb tray has been removed, no maths required. If your material is between the lines while resting on the bottom of your GF – not the crumb tray, you should be able to use Set Focus in the UI. If the top of your material is below the bottom line, use your favorite method (sheets of PG, tiles, 3-D printed stands, matching sets of trained hedgies, etc.) to elevate it and recheck. Repeat until …

This might help

[msbmakerspace]

I’ve been reading through this thread and then doing some practice on an old Macbook. I’m testing on the battery cover for a very old Macbook Pro. I found that if the focus height is set to .5" instead of the actual height of the material, .2", the etching comes out better, darker. Any ideas as to why? The settings I’m using are 300/Full/340 LPI.

[geek2nurse]

Moving this thread over to Beyond the Manual since it’s stuffed full of non-PG settings.

[geek2nurse]

I don’t have an answer to your question, since I can’t imagine why defocusing would make the engrave darker, but maybe someone else will come along who has an idea!

[jamesdhatch]

@msbmakerspace

I found that if the focus height is set to .5" instead of the actual height of the material, .2", the etching comes out better, darker. Any ideas as to why? The settings I’m using are 300/Full/340 LPI.

Because you’re spreading the beam wider which gives you the same effect as higher LPIs which on anodized coatings ablate more of the coating or dye. On some materials like wood, a defocused image is usually lighter because less power is applied to any given point on the material. On aluminum, there’s no real difference between enough power to mark and multiples of that power in terms of the effect. You are getting less power with the defocused setting but it’s still well over the minimum needed to ablate the coloring.

The advantage of defocus over increased LPI is speed - your defocused 340 LPI is much faster than say a focused 1350 LPI at the same speed & power as it’s making 1/4 of the passes.