This 15" bowl was quite challenging to make. I knew I had enough distance width wise to fit the bowl, but was worried about whether I could make the project work since the depth was larger than what I could accommodate in a single pass on the GlowForge. Fortunately, there is extra depth in the cutting bed to accommodate the laser head assembly. This gave me room to position the bowl for cutting.
I broke up my design into 2 sections which both comfortably fit within the cut window on the GlowForge. After the first pass, I rotated the bowl ~180 degrees and did the same for the design. The really tricky part was lining up the design so I didn’t end up with any unnatural gaps or spacing between the two halves of the design. This would be much more difficult if I had lines that had to connect between the top and bottom half of the design.
The laser engraving on the bowl was about 1/32" deep so the colored ribbons stand proud of the surface. This creates a slight shadow to the edges of the colored areas and further helps to accentuate the color on the face of the bowl. The laser engraved areas also showed off the grain of the Swamp Ash that was used. Since the porous areas of the wood are softer, the laser cuts into those areas a bit deeper and creates deep black lines that flow from the natural wood to the color areas. It is a very unique effect and one that I wasn’t fully expecting.
Overall, this has been a great project to work on and the GlowForge definitely took this piece to a whole new level.
