Just spending a little time doing some testing on the 1/4" acrylic that I finally was able to break into usable size for the Glowforge. In the photo, ignore that deep score across the top on the back sides of the test pieces, that was just one of my unsuccessful scoring attempts, not the laser.
Anyway, besides the fact that engraving on acrylic is really awesome, I thought folks might be interested in a different material for color infill. What I’m using is different colors of patinas by Vintaj. They came from my local Hobby Lobby when they were having one of their periodic 50% off sales. They are intended to work on metal but seem to work pretty well on acrylic as well. I’m thinking the advantage over acrylic paint might be a lower likelihood of peeling off, but YMMV.
I’m looking ahead to making shallow moulds, probably from acrylic, and trying to see what kind of surface detail I might get.
If you used 340 lpi, I assume You could create a sort of cross hatching with every other line left un-etched, of about 170 lines, or to be more realistic, something like 50 lines to the inch would be no problem ?
John
At this time the lowest setting is 75 LPI I believe. At that setting you can see space between the lines. On the tile on the left, the text was engraved at 75 LPI.
Oops, correction. I just looked and there are additional lower settings, going down to 10LPI. So your scenario is certainly possible.
What a fantastic idea for keeping track of the results of different settings - those are so much prettier than what I’m doing! (And I love those paints.)
It’s 1/4" cast acrylic found in our area on Craigslist for an outstanding deal ($5 each for 10 sheets of 19" x 32"). Not Proofgrade but I used PF settings on it as a starting point and they got me really close.
