Vector Laser Engraving.

[Tweakie.CNC]

Another very short video clip of Sam's Wile.E.Coyote.

This is engraved with my CO2 laser head (finished at last, well almost) onto a small piece of MDF.

                 http://www.cooperman.talktalk.net/laser1a.wmv

Tweakie.

[studysession]

Nice work!!

[Tweakie.CNC]

Thanks.

Daft really, but this was the first thing done with the new laser head (which was some 7 months in the building) so I am really quite proud of that little bit of MDF.

Tweakie.

[studysession]

I would be too. Can't wait to get a laser engraver working on mine.

[kljsadfhklj]

Whoa that's awesome!

[Sam]

Dunno how I missed this one. Pretty cool, Tweakie. One of these days I gotta get me one of those.

[Tweakie.CNC]

Thanks Sam.

If it hadn't been for your Wile.E Coyote drawing I couldn't have done this  

Lasers are absolutely brilliant for some things and absolutely useless for others and in the laser project thread I am gradually getting to show all the things my laser is good at. Unfortunately this is not a complete story because different types of laser operate at different wavelengths and this then makes them suitable / unsuitable for a whole lot of different applications - what one type can do easily another type, possibly cannot do at all (bit like mills and routers I suppose).

Tweakie.

[Sam]

If it hadn't been for your Wile.E Coyote drawing I couldn't have done this

Lol. Yeah, it would have ended up being some other image, in which case irreversible damage to the space-time continuum would have surly occurred.

I think (I've been told not to) that the most suitable use for me personally would be for metal etching. Anodized aluminum to be exact. Is this something that would be achievable with relative ease?

[Tweakie.CNC]

Hi Sam,

I thought, after my post, that I must get around to laser etching the Wile.E, Acme rocket and Roadrunner that you coded - it's in the pipeline.

Lower power CO2 lasers will not etch into metals (it's a wavelength thing) but they are brilliant at ablating the dye layer in anodized ally (probably why they are used so much for tattoo removals).
Art went to a lot of trouble for us last November (even though he was really busy with Gearotic Motion) to correct a couple of errors which had been left in the Impact/Laser plugin and now this works really well for raster work.
I am sure you have seen this before but this was done on the rear of an old anodized panel and there is room for improvement but it is perhaps a good example of what can easily be achieved.
Art's plugin accepts .bmp and .jpg formats, allows scaling, inverse image, setting Y step over etc etc and I think I have shown that the results produced rival the low to middle price range commercial laser packages and Art says he only coded this plugin as a fun thing in the first place.

Tweakie.