Tried out laser cutting rubber to make a stamp set to use to mark laser stock
Made a file in Inkscape for each of the stamps, here they are being cut out:
I cut out all of the small wooden handles from a piece of scrap, then chamfered them on the belt/disk sander. Lesson learned - when making a stamp, remember to mirror the image:
Nice! Those look very cool!
Have you tried how deep does the ink seep into the wood? Hope it’s easily sandeable, looks it’s a great improvement!
Nice one Max! Came out a treat in the end!!! 
Will be very useful, thanks…
Well, unless I decide to charge £3.37 for some sheets, lol 
I assume you found the ink pad somewhere then or did you buy one?
What about paper labels? Too many steps at that point?
I used to use paper labels and/or pencil and found it satisfactory. But this looks like it has an added value of a cool project.
Reminding that any material used even for space has to be written as an expense to Steve for clear accounts.
Yeah, I had a similar concern but I guess we can just make sure ink is fairly dry and try it out ?
Or as Kyle said paper stickers.
(I personally found a sharpie for acrylic and a pencil for wood being my best friends at that job)
Maybe yes, I’m just not a fan of more stuff to just be used for the sake of it? seems a bit of a waste, let’s see how easy the ink sands away maybe, wouldn’t be an issue for everyone especially if we mark them right at the edge and people are not using every bit of the material?
Also, 2 sides to the sheets as well so maybe that makes it even more unlikely to be an issue?
Hardware store saved the day, think it was £3
yeah was thinking either stamp the worse-looking side, or is it a thing to have a graphite pad?
If it wasn’t a thing it is a thing now, what an idea!
Yeah I was thinking about that, probably a cake of graphite? powder would probably be a bad idea…
Do you have any advice you can share about how to prepare artwork and do the laser settings for this? I would love to make some business cards for my MA show this way.
Yeah! You need to end up with a vector file that’s a reversed negative of what you want the stamp to be. So take what you want the final thing to look like, mirror it, and make the shape black (or whatever color) wherever you don’t want ink to be, and red (or whatever other color) to cut the stamp out. I did mine in Inkscape - I had paths for the numbers, drew a box around it, mirrored it, then used the fill tool to end up with a negative. As far as laser settings, I experimented a bit - the one I ended up using is named something like “@mbg rubber” on Ruby if you’d like to use that as a starting point. If that didn’t make sense, let me know and I can upload an image of the file I made.
Doesn’t the trotec software have a setting for this? I seem to remember it varies the cut depth to give you sloping sides on the stamp. Probably reverses the image too.
There should be a trotec pre set as Trotec was originally a stamp maker making their own machines for…stamps making.
