What did mama buffalo say when her youngest went off to college?

Bison!

Thanks to an immensely generous forum member, I was able to not only check out and play around with the GFUI using the Forge with a Friend feature but I was also able to run through and print a file!

While on my way to my nephews birthday dinner, a private message popped up that some scrap Proofgrade maple was sitting in the bed and asked if I wanted to run anything. I turned around. Sorry, nephew! Eleven isn’t that big of a birthday anyways… kidding. Headed to dinner and then back home and luckily that piece of maple was still sitting there.

In between bites of my chicken florentine crepes, I was thinking about what I should run. I have a pretty decent mental catalog of images that I’ve taken over the years and my thoughts kept going back to an American Bison image that I made a few years back at Theodore Roosevelt National Park which is located near Medora, ND (if you haven’t been, it’s well worth the trip - a very underrated park!).

The thing about engravings, to me, is that they are difficult to envision what they will look like… well, engraved. I can envision pretty well how stuff will come out printed on canvas, wood, matte paper, metallic paper, etc. but the laser engraving is something totally new. And specialty mediums like wood, and glass require very specific images to work well in that medium. Not only does the subject matter need to be right, the image needs to be one that works with the constraints/features/limitations of the medium.

Hello, automagic, medium engrave settings. I didn’t want to waste the material I was so generously allowed to use, so I just went with straight automagic settings on this little piece; I placed and scaled the image in Illustrator and added a small cutbox around the borders and off we went; as simple as that.

Which was based on this image:
bison

Overall - this is a tough wait. And it seems that the wait has been growing exponentially tougher just over the past few weeks for whatever reason. But, being able to just push this through with automagic and be done is really freakin’ cool.

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That looks super. Thank you for providing the picture that you used, it helps a lot to see what can be done. :smile:

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Absolutely gorgeous! (And given your photography, I can’t wait to see what treasures you’re going to create when you get it.) :grinning:

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I don’t know that I’ll do a lot of engravings actually… I’m not really a HUGE fan of laser engraved images :confused: though, I’m fairly happy with how this turned out - especially with no special processing.

I think being able to go in and lay light vector scores and engraves though around select parts of an image could be pretty neat, especially if a printer head was an attachment. You’d have basically relief printed images.

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This came out stunning! And kudos to your friend - it was very kind of them to share.

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So, a cooperative and friendly Glowforge owner (a real owner with possession) signed you up as a friend user … which gave you access to the GfUI --> you then had the opportunity to sample the software with your original work. Wunderbar! So it seems as though the past requests to @dan and @rita to perhaps allow those of us waiting (and waiting … and waiting) for access to the user interface could now be granted by either an existing owner or from the mothership in Seattle. Of course realizing that the penultimate joy of pressing the glowing button would not be available. What do you think? :glowforge::sunglasses:

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That’s correct. If you’ve made friends you could call on an owner to make you a guest user of their GF :slight_smile:

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You don’t even know me and have figured out that I don’t play well with others :yum:. I tend to place responsibility on the entity which has the ultimate power to create/shape the UI to provide access. Besides, I’m the kind of a guy who usually would give the shirt off my back --> but I have difficulty asking for a favor or help.

And – I’m a visual learner. I have to see the process to learn the process. All this waiting and reading the amazing reports … the multitude of settings … the ongoing argument of whether 355" per minute should be dialed in or is it 100 … WOULD MEAN SO MUCH MORE if I could follow along with my own mock up.

That is all! :glowforge::sunglasses:

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A real owner with possession that had to hit the start button.

You can read more about that here:

Fantastic! Even before I saw the original photo, I was able to tell from the engrave that the bison were in some sort of fog or haze. That’s so neat!

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The muted contrast on the wood is just as captivating as the original photo! The result looks like a scene straight out of an old Western film.

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I’ll tell you this for me. It’s way, way more for me about making my own designs. If I have to take any time figuring out settings, it’s usually because there have been changes in the GFUI over the past eight months. I know there are esoteric details that are desired, but in the end the biggest part of my energy has been just getting the design made and tweaked. I may have to test something twice to dial in. Takes a couple minutes. I may have to redo something in the design three or four times while I find out that I can’t think in flat pack, nor 3D.

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Good advice about most of the time involved is with the design.

Beautiful!

And fun fact: The bison were not killed off by over hunting, as the popular explanation goes. It was actually due to diseases from domestic cattle.

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Interesting. I did a search using different search engines and couldn’t find any reliable source for this. I found a believable source that 9 million bison were killed for their hides to be traded with Europe which contributed to their demise. And I found this

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What would you consider a reliable source?

For this instance, something published in a peer-reviewed journal. I did a quick search and may have missed it. I’d like to see an article if one exists. It makes sense that disease was contributing, but there were other known contributing factors, and detangling them requires more than opinion.

I’ve read that before.

I think what it comes down to is similar to the passenger pigeon; that they were both shot in huge numbers yet it was really disease that was the demise of them.

A similar occurrence, I believe, happened in Texas with our whitetail deer population. It was largely decimated by anthrax.

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Could you forward some of those letters to our white tails in NJ?

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Or it may have been screw-worms (in the case of our deer herd). Either way - a lot of people are very surprised to learn that anthrax is naturally occurring in soil.

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