Just getting into the laser world and got my hands on a k40 with a compound lens/mini grbl. So far its been a blast playing around with slate with LB.
Ive been starting to mess with white tiles aka NWT with mixed results. I havent used smokey beige because I cant find it so im trying with flat white for now. Im also using ImagR to process the photos which have worked great for slate but im struggling with tile.
Any tips or advice if its possible to get something decent not necessarily Diode level quality?
These were done with that lens, I get the smallest ‘dot’ with it. The material determines what reasonable resolution you can maintain.
Here is a file from Russ Sadler that contains groups of dots at 0.1mm. Use the ‘zoom to selection’ when you load it or you won’t see it. It will let you check you dot size.
The biggest thing is getting your dot size as small as possible. You’ll probably want to get a lens specifically for this type of engraving. I’ve gotten good results on a 100w CO2.
Edit: Here are some ones I did forever ago. Black spray paint on white tile.
I just tried the 3part water/1part PVA/1part TiO2 on a 50W Universal Laser Systems(ULS) machine and had no luck. Lowest power setting was 10% so I tried at 10%, 50% speed and 500 DPI and it literally cleaned the tile where the grayscale gradient was.
Tried 10% power, 100% speed and 300DPI and it did similar but at the white end of the gradient it left more coating than the previous attempt.
Then I tried the default settings they(ULS - UCP driver) had for ceramic tile and it etched the tile ceramic coating right off with little blackening.
I’m going to test the same tile on my diode laser to see if it’s a coating problem.
