I spent the afternoon playing with my Rayzist LazerMask samples. It was tough to figure out the best Glowforge settings but I eventually got something good.
This is a neat material and you should check it out if you like glass etching. It is a game changer if you are used to vinyl sticker masks. The caveat, of course, is that the item you are etching must fit into your Glowforge, so vinyl cutter sticker masks still have their place for bigger items.
tl;dr
- Create a black raster image
- Engrave with “Vary Power”
- Speed 1700, Power 100, LPI 450
- Focus at actual material height, no tricks
More info
The balancing act is getting enough power down to make a nice clean engrave with a sharp edge, while avoiding these problems:
- Applying too much power to the glass, so you get an uneven fractured top layer. This will make an uneven result when sandblasting.
- Overcooking the mask material, which makes the image a little bigger than the artwork, and obscures details
My overall results were very good but if you have super fine details… like the points on tiny stars… they can still get lost. There just isn’t enough power delivered at the sharp point of the star unless the power is too high for the wide open areas of the design. No LPI/power/speed combo I tried could make this perfect. You can see the points are rounded on most of the stars in this test matrix.
But, those stars are 4 mm across, so it still looks great unless you get out a loupe.
Here the points on the stars are pretty good, but the body of the stars are overcooked. After sandblasting, the appearance was uneven because the laser made some of the top layer of glass loose… But not all of it.
After hours of messing around figuring out the technique… This took about 10 minutes to make… 5 minutes engraving, and 5 minutes sandblasting. (Test item is for a friend’s band.)
What you cannot see is the mask material sticks really well and holds up to blasting great. You can get enough relief to feel with your fingernail. If I had a better blaster, I could probably carve enough relief to see.