Fatherhood has changed what I’m interested in lasering… slightly. Got some simple maple wooden rings from Amazon, and am engraving names on them as gifts! They are solid maple and engraved nicely even without masking!
I made a jig for it first by cutting a circle out of 1/4" draftboard.
Laser Engrave settings (also added them on this handy spreadsheet: Glowforge Links)
Material Height: .45in
Power: 45
Speed: 500
Focus height: .43 (ended up looking a little sharper than .45)
Affinity Designer Settings:
2.733 diameter for the jig (for 1/4" draft board) - holds the ring perfectly in place.
2.02in for the ring with the name on it.
Copied and rotated 180º for the second ring.
Very interesting. The gkid of a friend is due in a few weeks and I ended up with a lot of 0.40x3x12 inch maple. To make a nice curved engrave and clean it up would not be difficult, or glue two half rings together with wood glue.
I would avoid glue, and definitely clean up the char really well, preferably just with water, and definitely not with any cleaning products you wouldn’t want to ingest.
I don’t know whether there are any chemicals that might be used in producing wood…definitely wouldn’t use “reused” wood, since you don’t know what it might have been exposed to.
All that said, no matter how much you try to protect your kids from noxious substances, sometimes it’s kind of hopeless. I realized this the day I found my daughter happily munching on half a cockroach. Never did know for sure where the other half went.
My kid found that chewing on my shoes was preferable to Gerber peas.
I grant you, those peas are really foul; but those shoes walked in perfectly awful places… DC Metro elevators for example.
I would agree about the glue and reused wood, though.
Best give a baby the kinds of things that I’d willingly stick in my own mouth.
A while back I was talking in a trike forum to a couple that having circumnavigated Australia went to do the same through S E Asia. Traveling by Catrike you really see things up close and he put up a photo from a local market stall that had tiny frogs grubs and cockroaches for sale. There was much discussion about how enthusiastic the kids were to sell as much as possible because if they weren’t sold they would be the main course for the family!
If I can find the discussion or a copy of the photo I will post it. The man was Australian but his wife was Cambodian and having seen his country they traveled hers and he was quite impressed at how much the back country there was a different universe of expectations.
The Elmer’s school stuff is apparently nontoxic, and there are also the various cereal pastes. So you could try that route with a fair amount of clamping force. Whatever you use, they’re not going to ingest a lot of it.
(We had the various plastic thingies, our fingers, and King Arthur’s recipe for nearly-indestructible biscuits. Apparently whatever was in those makes kids annoying as heck in their tween and teen years )
