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need some advise please engraving glass?
Hi all
i’ m thinking of starting up my own laser engraving business,
and i have been reading up as much as possible , my problem
is i want to put photographs on glass, plain glass vases can
they be engraved, using ceramicmark or graflux any other
medium, or could i just use black coloured vases.
Also is it worth buying PHOTOGRAV software.?
I ve got photoshop elements would that do.?P.S i will put on a picture soon.
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5 Replies
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You can engrave glass yes, but youll need a rotary attachment for anything like vases/glasses etc.
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You can engrave direct from Corel. If all you are doing is glass Id go with a sandblasting setup from the likes of Crystal Galleries. It will give you a much cleaner and consistent finish on all glass and crystal.
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Engraving glass is fairly straight forward with a laser engraver, preferably when it’s flat, it gets a little more complicated when doing rounded objects. Provided that it is straight up and down again it is straightforward but when it comes to vases you are going to hit problems.
The laser moves backwards and forwards whilst the laser continues to fire but remains at the same height. The rotary attachment jus rotates the workpiece. Vases are generally shaped thus, () the laser would be able to engrave on the widest bit but go out of focus on the narrower ends, resulting in a slightly blurred image. It will also distort the further from the centre you go. There is not really a great deal that you can do when that happens without going into a real trial and error process…. that’s usually unsuccessful.
I haven’t tried the cermark for ceramics as yet, mainly because there seems to be a problem getting it in this country and also because others that have used it didn’t give it a good review. The cermark for metal is fine and leaves a good black marking.
Photograv software is excellent in it’s own way, but the results are not always consistent. It sometimes takes a lot of wastage before you get a decent result, but when it comes to images, once you are used to it, time is shaved off the job quite dramatically. There are two versions about – 2.11 which I found excellent and version 3.0 the lastest.
The latter seems to conflict dramatically with the settings supplied and has lead to a lot of people just giving up on it. Personally I do quite a bit of lasering of images and I would not be without it. By the way, the price is a little on the high side for what it does. There are one or two filters that can be obtained for Photoshop which are pretty decent (still require a fair bit of practice though) Andromeda etchtone in particular. If you want to experiment, then I would suggest that you use that one.
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There are some problems when lasering glass
The way the laser does it is to thermally shock the glass when it fires and impurities in the glass expand at differing rates leading to shattering. the problem is to control the amount of shatter to get a smooth effect.
The way to do this is either lay wet newspaper on the glass and laser thru that , or put liquid diswasher on the glass and wait for it to almost dry and laser it.
These methods act as heat sinks and limita the area where the glass is thermally shocked and thus controls it.
Photograv is very good for a rough and ready method fo getting an image on the glass.
Here however is another method I have developed without using photograv
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showpost.php?p=510491&postcount=12 -
I have to say that the method that Rodney is showing is quite often the method that I use to engrave a lot of stuff. It generally turns out to be an almost guaranteed method of getting a decent result, where as Photograv can’t always produce the goods. But to be impartial, the photograv result is quite often a little more refined method, just ‘iffy’ at times.
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