Using engraving foil

[esimon1204]

Hi! I’m looking to make a sign using engraving foil on 1/8 wood. Does anyone have experience with this? Anyone know the settings that can be used? I’ve tried with the score feature and played with the power and speed settings but can’t get it quite right, where there’s no trace of scoring on the edges. I’ll be trying with a painted white base to see if there’s less trace, but we’ll see. any tips would be great!!! Thanks!!!

[geek2nurse]

I haven’t done it myself yet, but here are a couple of forum threads that might get you started in the right direction:

Hot Foil Stamping

For those not familiar with the process, it was historically used to put text on the spines of books, when it was called gold tooling. I have a small block stamper, and the foil is something like a mylar film, coated with an anodised layer of aluminium, and a heat/pressure sensitive adhesive layer. Press the hot platten, carrying a flat relief design in metal, onto the foil laying on the object below, and the adhesive(shellac?) transfers the coating from the mylar to the object. A good, cheap…

Preliminary experiments with laser foil

I’ve done a bit of fiddling with laser foil settings, and thought I’d post… everything was done on medium draftboard, so other substrates might differ, and the laser foil was polished gold so other surfaces might differ. I’ve been looking for the fastest/weakest settings that will cut through the foil. I ran two basic checks – one with laser foil on the draftboard (so masking removed first), and another where I put the laser foil on top of the regular PG draftboard masking. I did NOT put maskin…

(I searched on the word “foil” and limited the search to the “Beyond the Manual” section. Because of the rather generic search term you get a lot of noise, but digging through those results might yield more like these.)

[esimon1204]

yes I’ll continue to fiddle around with settings and material. So far the score setting is working best. Now in terms of the foil itself sticking to the wood, how secure is this? I mean we make things with the intention that it will last. Anyone know how long the backing of the foil lasts?