My wife has some weird moral aversion to mustard in any form. She’d have to be on vacation for like a week for me to try this and not have her gross out by some faint phantom scent leftover from lasered mustard days prior. 
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Well, this is fascinating. This community is seriously fun.
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Way to be Jason! Mustard FTW!
@lizabeta, Thanks for that link! 
In other news, CerMark stock lost 12 points today and Heinz shot up 20!
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If you want a dark marking, you probably still want Cermark. It is probably faster, too. If you just want marks and cost is a factor, mustard seems to work
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The spicy brown mustard might get a little hotter.
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And the Grey Poupon may give you a more refined mark…
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Does the exhaust send out mustard gas?
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So, I was genuinely worried about that… my 30 minutes of research seems to indicate no. Mustard gas got its name from a faint odor, but does not actually contain mustard. (You don’t know until you learn… and I didn’t want to post something that might ACTUALLY kill someone, even if it was in “Beyond the Manual”). HOWEVER, that being said… the video creator does give a general disclaimer… no idea on the safety of burning mustard at high temps.
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How many passes?
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I hope not too dangerous. Because mustard barbecue sauce is the superior barbecue sauce.
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Well, started low power (15 pews), and slowly cranked it up, keeping at 1000 zooms. It was during the reset/offline/lockup issues last night, so the other side of the blade has a faint mark. I eventually went up to full, even increasing LPI. I slowed speed, but didn’t like the way the residue on the burn looked, so I’d keep it pretty close to 1000. All told, it had 6 passes at full with a recoat each pass. In fairness, by then I was using a pretty thick coating of mustard out of general paranoia. (I may get adventurous, but I really don’t want to hurt my laser.) It did generally get darker each pass, but not sure how much of that was darkening metal and how much was burnt mustard.
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Here is an interesting article, if people what to try to figure out what is happening.
Also, here’s the mineral content in Mustard.
My unsubstantiated WAG is some of the minerals in the mustard are forming an oxide and bonding with the metal.
For those wondering how Cermark works.
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From the bottom of the machine up, did you try:
honeycomb
aluminum foil
knife
mustard
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Maybe also curl the foil up to make a bit of a box. I imagine the air assist blew some mustard if thick layers were used.
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I did not. I should have put some paper or cardstock under it.
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My best guess is that nickel in the steel forms black nickel oxides or sulfide in the presence of heat and an acidic environment. Nickel oxides can react with alcohols and turn green while converting the alcohol to an aldehyde or acid. I use this often as I can make black nickel peroxide, Ni2O3, cheaply from a soluble nickel salt and household bleach. The spent nickel can be reused by filtering and adding more bleach.
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Yea…thats why I asked you!!! 
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How’s the couch working out?
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Ex-Wife, Henry, Ex-wife. To be fair, the burn mustard was broiler-burned on a honey-mustard pork chops, and it was quite tasty. I’m still the better cook.
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Hmmm…just had an idea. The spent nickel peroxide can be a tacky gummy mess at times. Maybe if I spread a thin layer on a stainless coupon and hit with a laser, I might form an oxide layer that bonds to the metal below.
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