I am in the process of making a lot of etched Brass Aluminum reproduction plates. I had the best luck powdercoating the material and using the laser to ablate the areas I wanted to etch. I got pretty decent results. I have some photo resist material coming today, I’m going to try doing it the way they do in industry. I’m also custom etching PCB boards, so it’s all very closely related.
For quick and dirty, the laser does work very well. For production, it’s just too slow, and so far not quite as fine detail.
I’m very happy with the electro engraving process. The chemistry is simple and the process is very low tech.
I used double sided tape to stick it to the top of an aluminum tile that I am holding to the honeycomb with magnets. I put blue tape on the tile, and scored the outline into the blue tape. I then center the card in the score. For height, its the height of the tile, card and tape. which in my case comes to 0.17. Using this method you don’t have to be dead on with the height, you are using the score outline for alignment, not the camera. Autofocus takes care of the laser focus.
I’ve tried using the blue metal cards from Amazon, which are all but identical to the ones we order from morningprint.com only in silver. I used the same format expecting good results only on the blue card. But everything is kinda’ blurred and not crisp. Maybe I need to raise it up a bit too?
It’s actually coated not anodized…I ran into the same issue. You can clean it off and make it look crisper by rubbing (vigorously) with a damp Magic Eraser.
You might have better luck starting a new topic rather than asking in this old one, since this likely isn’t really related the original topic.
Have you done the first prints tutorials?
You can engrave both raster (“photo”) and vector (SVG) images on a Glowforge. The settings may be slightly different depending on your image. A photo may need to be set to “convert to dots,” for example.
Sharing your image (or part of it) will likely get you more tailored advice.
Does your machine move like it should be engraving when you run the job?
A common issue for the symptom you describe is having left the engrave power setting at the default, which will be too low to make a mark.
I would say fastened down in some manner or they’ll slide about. Maybe not much but it doesn’t take much to throw off a burn. Just had one of six wooden boxes do this to me over the weekend. It didn’t slide much or far…but slide just a bit on the same side every time so that the entire piece ended up fanned out and about 15* off kilter by the time it finished.