Got some inspiration with the results of trials by @VinVenture.
I had two things I wanted to see done like this.
Underwhelmed yet pleased, but this is from my design choices more than the process.
Things learned.
Focus on slow speed/high power Cut. Anything less just looks like scratches and you want the heat to glass the sandstone.
Avoid the edges. Too near and the heat absorbed will cause stress cracks.
Keep it simple. Even though I converted my designs to a single line format to cut fast, one was still too complex for this format and the other was okay but nearing too complex. If your design resembles the Nazca Lines in Peru like VinVenture’s did, you will be pleased.
All in all, some fun experiments. I have seen similar results with some other stone (maybe was a shale). If you liked the results shown and have some simple designs that interest you, sandstone is cheap, easy to find, absorbs liquids spills, and is usually ready to go as a coaster.
I really like it! Have you tried masking first? I’m wondering if the char look could be avoided, but possibly not. I’d love to see some gold acrylic paint flooded into the characters, I think that would be cool.
I have a Pro, that extra cooling probably matters.
No heat problems other than the first attempts were too close the edge.
You have to really dial up the heat on the coaster @cynd11. I suspect it would just ignite any sort of masking. The ‘engrave’ looking white outline is a heat residue effect from having to get it hot enough to glass.
If you are going to try and paint into the groove, you could probably get away with more of an engrave approach. That looks like a very fine chisel was used to scrape at it and there would be no reason to glass the sandstone then paint over it.
Sandstone absorbs liquids, so if you do paint on it, I wonder how that would add to the effect or just bleed into a mess. (hmm, where did I toss those cracked ones?).
More curious than anything.
If you have a window slot available to flush the system, why are you wasting time and money farting around with a filter?
Seems counter productive…
It’s not really a window slot, per say, but more that I opened my classroom window with a crank, stuck the hose out, shut it a bit, and stuffed pillows in the crack so that the snow doesn’t come in, lol. The filter box wasn’t well researched - they thought it would help it be self-contained in a classroom when they bought it and didn’t realize that there were frequent $250 filter changes. (I’m not going to be the one to tell them, I’ll let the other teacher do that.) Here is a photo of my very sophisticated setup.
Played with it ages ago.
Kind of got tied up with the painted resources and almost went back to tile. That started canvas but I moved to MDF because I have a lot of it and results are the same no matter the medium. Painted resource is a coin flip. It either comes out epic or a tosser. The unknown aspect keeps it fresh.
