I love having nice, personalized books for all kinds of purposes and have tried making them a few different ways. Thought I’d share what I tried and the results.
#1: The super-easy way. A pre-made blank journal that already has a wood cover. Toss it in the Glowforge and engrave.
Material: Wooden Notebook with Unlined Pages - 5.6” X 8.3”
Settings: 1000/60/225
#2: The cheap way. Buy any notebook you like, measure the spacing between the spirals to add holes (circles or squares) to your a vector design, remove the existing covers and replace them with your wooden ones. This started out as a blank “sketch book” with nice thick pages of blank paper. You could just as easily pick up a journal from Target or Wal-Mart.
Material: HD PureBond 5/32" Walnut Plywood
Settings: PG Medium Walnut Plywood
#3: The homemade way. Punch your own paper and bind the book from scratch.
Materials
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White 8x10" cardstock and a hole punch
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Medium maple plywood for the covers, cut/engraved at the Proofgrade settings
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Chicago screws from Amazon in two lengths, one long enough to go through both covers and the stack of paper, and a shorter length that only goes through the cover and the binding
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Faux leather to bind the cover to the spine, laser cut to size with holes for the chicago screws, and some superglue as well. I used this saddle collection sheet cut at 245/50
Bonus: Kraft or chipboard books can be engraved too.
This was a kraft journal from Michaels, engraved at something like 2000/full IIRC. I lost the saved custom setting when Glowforge wiped out all the vector engrave settings that were saved with speeds over 1000.
Thanks!