What amazing fun!

Made on a Glowforge
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Received a pre-release Glowforge yesterday, and with the help of my kind son-in-law, was able to get it up and running quickly. At first, we had a connection issue, but that wasn’t on Glowforge, that was on me. We started out mainly doing traces, so that the two youngest grandsons could go home with a ‘souvenir’. They also made one each for two older brothers that weren’t able to be there. I first made my ruler, using the template provided by Glowforge. The ruler is becoming more and more the symbol of someone who has had the incredible fortune to use a Glowforge, so here is mine;

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My grandsons made some little tokens of sorts…by hand drawing on a piece of paper with a black sharpie. We put it into the Glowforge and used the trace function. Took us a bit to figure out about getting double lines, but all in all, they came out great and they had a ball, as did the grownups watching. Here are some of their little medallions and tokens;

This morning, I wanted to try my hand at some of my own things. I had a design saved which uploaded fine as an SVG, however it wouldn’t accept my text because it needed to be converted to paths. I tried to do that in my design program but have still been unsuccessful, so far. I won’t quit trying though. Since I couldn’t use my design that way, I just printed it out and again used the trace feature to make some very small little wooden test card type things. ( it’s referring to an event we’re putting together this summer on the coast) Because the image of the crashing wave was very detailed, when placed on such a small area, the laser burned all those details that were bunched into one place, so when I peeled the masking from the wood, it pretty much just made a small hole in that spot. Might be difficult to see in this photo;

So next time, I didn’t remove all of the masking…especially in those very vunerable spots;

Last time was to make the piece larger, so that the detail in the wave wouldn’t suffer so much from the laser. This time, I chose the mid-dark engrave and left some of the masking on it;

And the same one with most all of the masking removed.

So that’s it for now…time to stop writing and time to start making stuff again! :relaxed:

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BTW, I played around with manually adjusting the engrave power/speed, and it’s pretty easy to find a setting that won’t punch through to far. But that looks great as is… The only problem with leaving the masking on, is the stench seems to be in the masking…

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Wow, some talented kids there! Those are great designs. Sorry to hear that text to outlines conversion is a problem for you (Affinity Designer, right?). If you have some text you want converted I’ll be glad to do it for you (as long as I have the same font).

Your lighter engraved sample looks fantastic!

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That’s some great artwork by everyone involved! (Y’all are going to have a ton of fun with that thing!) :smile:

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Congrats!

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A campfire, a beach, a glass of homemade wine, grandkids running around with sharpies, and a forge in the background…

Now that is what life is all about…amiright…amiright??

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Oh thank you so much! I plan to use my Affinity book that I bought and see if I can figure it out, first. If I can’t seem to do it or get sick of trying, I’ll let you know. Very kind of you to offer.

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Ha! That’s funny…and would be great if that was possible…but my forge will be staying at home while we’re oceanside in July. In the meantime though, I plan on doing all of those things…but for now without the beach and a campfire. But of course…youareright, youareright! :smile:

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Hey @Xabbess, I just did a Google search and found another person asking that question. Apparently it can be done; check it here: https://affinity.serif.com/forum/index.php?/topic/362-create-text-outlines/

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Looks like @Xabbess took matters into her own hands. I love a doer. Glowcon is now July 10-14 at some beach on the Pacific. I’ve never been there, but I’m guessing it’s BYOG (Bring Your Own Generator.) :raised_hands:
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PS - I may feel bad if hundreds/thousands of people don’t get this is a joke and show up. After I’m done herniating myself from laughter of course.

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Really enjoying watching you come up with things to laser, @Xabbess!

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Beautiful job on your wave engrave. I like the lighter engraved one the best because your image and text show up better. Your description is VERY helpful. :slight_smile:

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Thank you so much. Dang life is getting in the way around here today. I will check out the link. I did find some instructions in my book, so have made up a test file to see if I did it correctly. If I don’t get that darned red error thing, then I’m home free.

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Well, I got it and it’s a great idea…where exactly have you reserved space for all of us? Folks sure can’t show up if they don’t know the secret locations, now can they?! ha ha!

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Hey @cynd…I took a look at that link. It’s 3 years old, and probably not much has changed since then, but the poster was asking about converting to curves, which unless I’m mistaken is not the same as converting to a path. I’ll check it out some more and let you know what I find out, though. Again…thanks for taking your time for me.

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Yay! Glad you’re up and running!

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So happy you have a working pre-release and like @hansena said - are up and running !! I like the cut outline of the elephant (although I’m assuming that was your mentioned double inside/outside line cut). seems like there are uses for thin outline silhouette like that (albeit fragile I assume). Look forward to your next works don’t forget to sleep !!!

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So excited to see this come together!

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Great stuff! I bet your grandsons were over the moon making those tokens. Thanks for sharing. I can’t wait to see what is next!

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Another option on the text is to generate it in a separate drawing, export it as a .jpg and then import the image back into the original design. If the text is solid black it will engrave just fine.

Alternately, I’m not sure how well they play together, but Inkscape is free and converting text to path is super-simple.

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