You can only scale down so far

I again used one of Steve Good’s designs and adapted it for the GF. I wanted to use the leftover pieces of the blue plywood I had from the wine carriers. I had to scale down a 14” wide design to a 5” wide piece the detail in some of the lettering burnt out.

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I have been using his designs as well and it is interesting to see just how small you can go before losing the ability to properly cut the design. Nicely done! :sunglasses::glowforge:

Yeah, that happens… that looks great though…looks vintage! :wink:

I has a nice distressed look, like an heirloom handed down…

wouldn’t you turn up the resolution of the activity on the GF when you shrink something like that?

Very cool piece!

John

You can play with the speed power etc to get a lot of detail, if Jules can engrave a grain of rice, you can get an engrave of the finest detail. getting a set of letters, Getting it to cut is another matter, but deep engraves are possible even to the point of leaving only spider webs as so:


the piece is about an inch tall and is 1/16" Walnut.

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There are ways to compensate for the kerf at that level of shrinkage but it would be a lot of work. Basically you move the cutline outward so the kerf doesn’t take so much of the material. What I do is place a “kerfwide” stroke on the line then do an outline stroke (this would be in Illustrator) then choose the outer line to cut on. That is a really simplified description and maybe you’ve tried it already.

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I just made my own blue plywood with Aniline Dye. It’s like using a liquid sharpie.

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As medicine for fish there is a material called Methylene Blue that will even dte tile I think as it even dyed the fish tank sand, it is not kind to creatures of the microscopic world, but could make a difference in wood and even make some protection for the wood.