Hopefully there are folks old enough around here to recognize the quote.
My niece is in Army ROTC and almost a year away from her commission and I was trying to figure out a gift for her since A) she has to miss our passover seder and B) I have a glowforge…
First off a nice dorm room door sign. The US Army logo has 3 colors (black, yellow and white) and figured I’d make each a different level of engrave, so brought the logo into AI and did a 3-color trace, which worked perfectly. Exported it to another document with the text, and voila.
I did mess up a bit with the engrave order, so sadly the star had 3 shades got overwritten to two (the center of the star should be wood color). But it still looks awesome, actually way better than this photo (which somehow makes the star look grainy, it’s not). I may redo it at some point to have the white star… This is in proof grade maple.
but, wait, I have good artwork and a Glowforge, what else could I do with it? Well heck, I had all those leather luggage tag blanks from Laserbits, better try that…
Now first off when actually lasing, it smelled like a goat and a cow had a high-speed head-on collision and their gas tanks burst into flame. But moments afterwards, the smell had receded to the point that my wife shockingly walked in ( was waiting for the “WTF??”) and said “oh, smells like when I use the cautery in surgery”. So I guess having a surgeon for a wife finally paid off (it does smell like that now, but during, smells like my first description)…
First attempt was a fail, because I decided to keep the score line - don’t do that. it cut all the way through, interestingly only on the top left half (not sure why only one diagonal half)
So removed the score line
Now a couple of tricks.
Having had the masking paper (Laserbits masking paper) come off on the ply, I decided that wrapping it all the way around and sticking it to itself would provide perfect masking. it absolutely worked, and the masking was perfect.
I just randomly selected the heavier of the leathers, which seems to be right.
Impression?
OK the precision of leather is outrageous. If you look you can see clearly the periods in U.S. which are perfectly engraved. Those dots are maybe the size of a 10-point period? Maybe smaller? Just incredible sharp engraving, and this isn’t even proofgrade (although this is specific for laser engraving from laserbits)
Now @morganstanfield, I know you are busy with the baby, but you just need to toss him to the curb, because what this thing can do with leather with my zero-experience will produce pure magic in your hands!
j/k
