So, for Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s winter tour five years ago, there was a fan club exclusive T-shirt design that my wife absolutely loved. It was just light line art on a black background, and to this day it’s the only TSO tour shirt she’s ever wanted. Sadly, the shirt is pretty much worn out by now, but (there’s always a but) earlier this year I was looking around again and found one on eBay in fairly decent condition!
So, having acquired a respectable specimen, I went to work on Project General Tso. Although the design was in reasonably decent condition, trying to do any type of automatic image tracing just wasn’t working (even with ironing and Photoshop and so on). That said, there’s not much you can’t do if you’re willing to put in hours and hours with Bezier splines in Inkscape…
I swapped out the text at the top for the classic Trans-Siberian Orchestra banner (saving a lot of tracing and making it look sweeter), and I dropped the TSO logo on the bottom in the place of the 2019 winter tour text. That all done, the obvious next thing to do was to plop it into LightBurn and throw an hour and 17 minutes worth of photons at a Contigo travel mug:
In order to engrave the mug in one operation, I used this low-profile rotary axis from omtech , a set of 100mm stand off risers from Silent Mfg , and this Cloudray F420/300x300mm lens from Amazon. The lens got me the depth of focus I needed, the stand-offs lifted the entire tower 100mm off the bed, and with the low-profile rotary axis, I could then hold the mug low enough to get everything at the right distance.
Anyway, the travel mug will have to do for this weekend’s TSO concert trip, but now that I have a design all pulled together, I’m going to have to actually get around to pulling out the screen printing setup I have staged for the next phase of the operation, i.e. printing her very own one-of-a-kind not-available-anywhere-ever TSO fan T-shirt. 
(Note to self: It might be good to someday make something that you can actually sell instead of just hobby projects for purely personal use. Still, making your wife’s Christmas isn’t a bad thing.)
Fiber laser rated power: 60W
Lens: F420 (300x300mm)
Speed: 50mm/s
Max power: 50%
Frequency: 25kHz
Q-Pulse: 200ns
Line interval: 0.0250 (bi-directional)
Scan angle: 0
Passes: 1
), but I’d like her to still be able to differentiate wake-up coffee from leaving-for-work coffee. I figured I may as well try engraving the plain metal.
