Here’s some more random photos. One of them is the acrylic after being defocus engraved after regular engraving. Gonna try just doing defocused from the get go
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Oh yeah! You made those awesome catan tiles and molds! Are you planning on revisiting those after you get your laser at all?
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Indeed. I need to build border tiles, roads, cities, settlements, and a custom case.
I will probably make some new clay models here shortly for water tiles, robber, and actually mold and cast the ship I sculpted. (Ill post pictures of that later when i get home if anyone’s interested).
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Did you produce the outer bevel on the acrylic triangle with the forge, or was that done another way ?
John
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Heres what my file looked like. Cut outside perimeter. Engrave black is a deep engrave, engrave grey is a shallower engrave.
I wish I had a photo of the outside cut on this though, its so clean. really happy with the edge quality the glowforge is giving on acrylic.
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I must assume then that it’s just the lighting that makes it look like the outer edge is bevelled ?
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No actually a failed cut attempt (accidental incorrect focal length) rounded the outer edges. Defocused engraving rounded the inside.
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That’s a very useful bit of knowledge. Thanks 
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NP. If you do a defocused score you could probably achieve the same results on purpose! =)
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Thanks takitus. That has inspired me to start a thread on questions that I’d like answered, with a view to doing bas-reliefs .
EDIT cancel that. The search produced most of the answers to my questions !
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Thank you for giving that much detail about what you did to get the results that you showed us in your photos. Being new to this , this is VERY helpful. Thank you for sharing. 
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Is there a thing in the UI for defocused, or just manual focus and lying to the machine?
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BTDT. And my wife claims that childbirth hurt 
I did notice an interesting evolutionary thing occurring when I did that (after the fact musings of course). We’re hard wired to jerk our hands back when touching something hot. But that doesn’t work when we’re aligning a laser and burning our hand instead. We should be jerking the other hand back to get our finger off the trigger button. Instead we jerk the burning hand back, hit the case and burn another part of the hand before we figure out it’s the other hand stupid. 
Then I wonder how long evolution will catch up so we jerk the correct hand back.
Now if I had my GF I wouldn’t be having these kinds of deep philosophical thought memes running through my head.
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You set the focus height at the bottom. 1/4 is going to be the worst thing to attempt to defocus engrave because its right in the middle of the focus range, so youll have 1/4" defocus range on that max at the beginning.
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You should bump any thread you find via search that is useful for novel cases. Plenty of new people to the forums in the past few months.
I’m gonna have so much trouble converting to this. I’ve been thinking mm/sec for so long that going to in/min is gonna cause me to stop and think every single time I send something to the GF.
It wouldn’t be too bad - make the switch once and I’m in the inch & minute world…but I will still work with other lasers where it’s mm and seconds.
It’d be great if the software (someday…hopper type idea) would allow us to switch units.
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We’ve definitely mentioned that would be VERY helpful.
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Yes please! My girlfriend made us a couple of cool pieces for our catan set out of sculpey. A new robber that looks like a rogue from WoW. I love it.
I saw your set online a while ago and was part of what made me want to get a 3D printer because it was so awesome. I can’t wait to see what else you’ve made!
Maybe just make a new thread about your catan stuff. We need another catan thread. Now I’m excited!
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Haha I definitely have gotten a laser burn streak down the side of my hand from lifting it into the beam and pulling back when I felt the burn! Was holding the pulse button the whole time lol
An interesting related note: My mother is a PhD in neuroscience and was doing research into free will during the late 80s to early 2000s which involved a lot of in depth studies of the pathologies of neurotransmissions. A lot of quick responses due to pain stimulus apparently originate in the spinal cord before the signal even has time to make it to the brain. This is a very important factor in the debate of whether we actually have free will or not.
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A quick workaround is 1/4" spacers, to bring it to the top of the focal range.
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