Help a long user of Mach and long time member of this forum.

I have been building some kinetic sculpture / dangerous toys lately. I used Mach 3 and Vectric Aspire to create some beautiful details to otherwise plain wood and plywood. I entered my latest creation in a contest at Instructables.com. The prize is a laser engraver/cutter!  You know a CNC guy can put that cutter to good use.   I though I could recruit some people on this forum to help me out.

Go to http://www.instructables.com/id/Steampunk-Segway-Legway-/ and click to vote near the top. The sites sometimes acts a little flaky with Internet Explorer, so if you have trouble try Firefox, Chrome or Surfari...try those.

Thanks...If I win I will gladly let Chicago area forum members use the engraver/ cutter.

P.S.  I gave a nice shout out to Mach on my contest entry.

Legway....the human powered steampunk Segway.

Nice design - Good Luck with the contest.

Tweakie.

Yesterday I machine a front and rear panel
for a custom  combination VFD and G540 system. After machining I wanted to label the various switches. The problem was that machine engraving is slow. I have a laser but lasers don't engrave unanodized aluminum. It would have cost $105 for a lot charge to anodize 4 panel. That was too much .
 There is a marking fluid for aluminum that lasers do work with but again they are only good on series 5,6 and 7000 aluminum. The aluminum on my front panel is pretty soft and probably only a 2000 series so that was not an option.
 So what I did was to leave the protective film on the aluminum panels and then I laser cut/engaved the letters into the protective film after machining to serve as masking tape. Now all I have to do is peal away the protective film where the letters are and spray paint the panel. Last remove the protective film. I tested this method on a test panel and it worked great. 
 I know not every one has a 30 watt laser but for those that do this tip may be helpful
Dan Mauch
www.camtronics-cnc

Good info Dan. Do you have any photo's of the results ?

Tweakie.

 On the test panel I wasn't being very careful . I hadn't let the paint cure as per the instructions  so there are some scrathes but saw enough to know that it works.  The other picture shows the protective film after machining and laser cutting of the stencil. Just have to peel of the lettters, clean,paint, let cure and the remove the rest of the film.
Dan Mauch
www.camtronics-cnc

 For soem dumb reason the other picture didn't upload
Dan

Thanks for posting Dan, looks like a useful technique.
I think, as you have found, some practice is required to achieve the best results. I will give it a try and see what happens.

Tweakie.