Hello All,
I have someone looking to have these boxes and usb’s custom engraved for her wedding customers. I haven’t done anything yet on Walnut, and was hoping someone would be able to give me some advice on what settings to use for a product like this.
Thanks in advance!
The Proofgrade settings for walnut hardwood might be a good place to start.
Caveat: Be prepared to test, adjust, then re-test. This will require the purchase of “extra” units of whatever your engraving.
Walnut engraves don’t have a lot of contrast as a rule.
Example:
This was something I did in Walnut, I thought it had a good contrast… Maybe I just got lucky.
i think it really depends on the walnut. there are so many different species of walnut, some of them are very resiny and engrave very dark. the only way to know for sure is to test.
But is that PG walnut plywood? Is looks like it’s engraved through the veneer into the MDF core.
I’ve been cutting a lot of walnut lately and the PG walnut ply settings work fine. I haven’t done any engraving yet, but there are plans. I’ll post with results when I get to that phase of the project.
1/4" Solid non-PG walnut.
Wow! nice, that is very dark.
Yeah I was impressed with it. Unfortunately the vendor I got it from was not very responsive nor cared much about the quality of their ‘finish sanded ready to use’ product. I don’t think @ChristyM ever got her order. I have a drum sander on the way so if I catch it on sale again I might consider getting more, but it was definitely not the finished product they described. They blamed it on a new person cutting the wood for the deep gouge marks as if that person had nothing to do with their company/reputation.
oh THOSE guys.
Yeah them… They really had a chance to find a great market for their wood but dropped the ball in so many ways. I understand getting a lot of orders you didn’t expect and could not handle it but they went so far to dig as deep of a hole as they could. Had they just owned up and said sorry…
yeah, they totally messed that up with that woman’s vitriol.
That contrast is crazy. All the walnut I’ve seen (black walnut) engraves really light. I get dark engraves on mahogany and maple, less so on padauk and especially walnut.
i think there are a lot of differences to how much (i guess) resin? is in each subspecies and depending on where it comes from.
Yeah @rbtdanforth and I have talked about that concept with mahogany. I usually find it engraves very dark and cuts easily, he has not had that same experience.
i think mahogany is a lot like walnut in that there are a lot of subspecies and it’s grown in very different regions/climates. i think both of those things could easily affect hardness and how dark the engraves are.
Both cleanup and even the location in the tree can make a big difference This was near the walnut sapwood:
As for Mahogany, there is this;
Check out my settings in this post:
I use the same walnut usb keys from Amazon, although without the box. the usb keys are very popular with my friends, I’m currently running out of my 4th batch of 10. I have several different designs for them too.
Good luck!
