laser engraved button

hate to post laser engraving, but I just thought this might be cool enough for the cafe.

That is really cool!!

anybody have a link to more info about this process? pretty impressive...

They are cool. I remember when the first wood laser was developed. A couple of guys were working in the garage on laser technology back in the early 80s or mabe even the 70s. They had set up the crystals to create the beam but were afraid to stick their hand into see if it was functioning. One off the guys picked up a piece of fire wood and passed it through the beam. This particular technology would not cut metal. Brass anyway. They cut holes in the brass and passed it through the beam and it would cut only where the holes were,

They developed a rotary table that you could place wooden objects in (remember the desk sets and tape measures and jewelry boxes that were the first laser engraved things to hit the market. they used a large brass disk ( think record) with the designs cut into it and built the laser to track like the needle on an album.

When they came out I was carzy about how much money could be made in the gift insustry. Checked on the pricing at the time. Remember no computers no high teck anything. A 36" unit with adjustable holders for the whatever was going to be cut and the brass sheet cut with your patterns was 50K. That is your history lesson for today-Fred

It may not be engraving but it's pretty darn cool!

piece of cake on my laser. create a matrix of circles in corel. vector cut a 1/8" piece of ply wood with say 20 circles. take one of the circles and enlarge it to a workable size create the design, then return it to its original size. back the original series of holes with cardboard or whatever. this prevents the buttons falling thru the vector table. then duplicate your original design and assign the 20 to their circles. set the machine to raster only, and manual focus. something like a button would not do well with auto focus. assuming correct speed, power, and resolution settings, pound on the enter key. make sure fume exhauster is on, and compressor as well. go and do yer toenails. when you get back you'll find 20 buttons ready to market ! it's really that simple.
shown is an example of the positioning cavity. it held i think 20 at a time. this wood was .25" thick the neat thing, while the laser is working, one can be engraving by hand. now, that is cool !

That's great!!, thanks for sharing, truehand,

monk, doing your toenails with the laser, now that will be really cool :thinking:


Richard.

That's super cool! I wonder if it's that fast or if the video's been sped up? The dang thing even countersinks around the button holes!