Good morning (o;
What options are available to product nice looking aluminum front panels for self built electronics when having a LED laser only with around 5W optical power?
Directly engraving is not possible on anodized aluminum with such low power…but read somewhere that they spray paint the panel first and laser etching away the paint…
Is there a special spray paint needed or can I go just with simple acrylic paint?
thanks in advance
richard
There is a spray product called CerMark & TherMark (the name might vary by country location, I’m located in the United Kingdom). You spray this onto your metal and then run your engraver over the sprayed area and then wash/clean the spray off. It will leave black markings on the metal. CerMark & TherMark - CSI Manufacturing Limited
I’ve also seen more home-grown results done with a Sharpie. Simply color the panel with your Sharpie and then engrave it, gently use some cleaning product to clean away the sharpy and the engraved area will have marking, though not permanent ones.
Ah right…that was the brand I couldn’t remember…
So you actually engrave with the laser what should stay permanent?
The one video I saw was the opposite…the paint was removed where the laser engraved…
Hmm…they’re speaking about CO2 laser only…seems LED lasers are out here…
muchas gracias (o;
richard
There are various types and makes. You’d need to go investigate, the CerMark link seemed like a good jumping off point. Good luck.
Well I just ordered a small can and tape for testing (o;
Might be I’ll get a CO2 laser next year…there is plenty of space left in the basement besides my CNC milling machine and lathe 
I use LBT100 which is probably similar to Cermark, both work on many materials.
The problem is most appear to target co2 and most don’t mention led.
I have a 30W Neje and using LBT100 it looked great, but there was insufficient bonding to make it useful. I didn’t try to get it to work and wrote the low power/different wavelength off as why it wouldn’t work. The cost of LBT100 is rather high so I’m conservative with it.
Both of these work by creating a molecular bond between the materials, so they need some heat.
If it’s anodized aluminum, you might just give it a try, many of these will remove the anodizing…
I haven’t tried TiO2 on stainless, that is the basis of the Norton tile method… TiO2 is pretty low cost, but it’s a powder, low toxicity and difficult to apply evenly. You can find lots of information on this, here or other sites.
Good luck… let us know if you ‘discover’ a workable solution.
Although not perfect, the Sharpie method is pretty good. Did a test several years ago, It stood up to about a hundred dishwasher scrubs.
Good afternoon (o;
Finally got some time to try the CerMark tape as I could get a small sample piece:
Does look jaggy…maybe I should lower the scan interval…but lasered at 50mm/sec at 100%…
Interestingly I had some aluminum profile piece (40x20mm) and tried that as well with 50mm/sec at 100% and it made visible marks compared to another aluminum plate where it showed nothing:
So I went on and lower the scan interval from 0.08mm to 0.04mm as the 0.08mm interval showed visible scan lines:
So the markings is a little darker, but increased the speed to 75mm/sec…the “1” on the left I tried with horizontal and vertical sanning, but not much of a difference…
Wondering now why not all anodized aluminum plates behave the same, e.g. show no marks…
Otherwise it would enough for me to make some nice front panels for self developed electronics (o;
Next step is to lower the scan interval for the CerMark tape…which would be a nice solution as you can apply it only there where you need it…
I have a 50W co2, with lbt100 I run 500mm/s @ 15% power… I think cermark and lbt100 are very similar products…
I’ve run a few tests with the diode laser and I can scratch the lbt100 off with my fingernail. So it didn’t really have a molecular bond like it does with the co2.
The diode was a 40630 NEJE (30W in).
Lower the scan interval with the cermark and see how it works…
Can you scratch it off?
