Laser engrave glass settings?

Discussion
1

Hi,

I tried to engrave some glass and got pretty poor results.

20170524_194620.jpg2988×5312 4.47 MB

20170524_194550.jpg2988×5312 3.34 MB

I used the settings on the cheat sheet by the machine (but may have put them in wrong of course).
As you can see I got very wide pitted lines (about 0.5mm) the line width was 0.001 inch.

Has anyone got any tips for settings etc?
or can you see /guess what I’ve done wrong?

Thanks,

2

Use raster engraving, rather than lines. The “cut” operation dumps too much heat at once into the glass, so you get this extreme spalling. Your design should be a 2-tone image, rather than thin lines. Try 100% power, 100% speed, 300 ppi. Turn down the power if the engraving is still too deep/rough.

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3

Agreed, raster only on glass, not vector, if you do vector go very, very fast and low power and adjust the power up until it marks it.

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4

Thanks guys,

I’ve seen some people on the internet that put a damp paper towel on the glass for a frost effect. Have you tried this?

5

Opinion is divided. That’s how we were shown to do it by Trotec (they used newspaper) but it seems to work just as well without. Experiment!

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6

I’ve never found it to be that important, but your milage may vary. Whatever the glass is coated in usually makes a much bigger difference.

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