I am looking for any help engraving pelican cases with my logo. I used to pay someone to do this for me with stellar results, so I know this procsess is possible. I purchased identical equipment and software that he was using. The gentleman also recommended that I run my image through ImagR pre laser tools to get the image ready for engraving. I have tried numberous attempts to try and replicate with zero succsess. Its either nothing, or melted gook. I understand that it takes a lot of trial and error to get the speed and power where it needs to be, but i cant seem to even get in the same ballpark. I know there are a million settings, but i cant seem to tweak anything to the right direction. Maybe something to do with the strike pattern, or the image itself? I should also add that I have had some success on wood.
If your supplier was kind enough to give you the information on his equipment and setup do you think he’d actually give you his project files or the settings that he used?
Frankly it’s asking a lot but not sure what your relationship is with him since he’s already given you a lot of tips. Perhaps you could buy the file from him.
Outside of that my basic observations:
It looks like you’re melting the material more than engraving it. Double check your focus. Make sure you’re getting as tight a focus as possible. What specific laser module do you have?
If your focus is good, you’re likely running too slow and/or too high a power. Bring down power until you’re only getting a clean engraving with no residual melting. What are your current settings?
From a search it looks like these cases are made from polypropylene. Can you confirm? Not familiar with how this engraves but I suspect temperature control is going to really important.
Air assist. Do you have air-assist setup? I’m guessing this will be important to keep the material from melting while you’re trying to get fine detail on the design. If you don’t have air assist now try passing a high speed fan over the surface of the material as you’re engraving to see if it helps control melting.
Instead of going for your whole logo in one shot you may want to try to find as much sample material as you can and test smaller patterns on that before you go all in.
It’s hard to tell for sure but I wonder if the blow molder has that decal engraved in the tooling. Since the plastic doesn’t burn up during laser engraving I think it will mound up around the line and look bad. The lighter you engrave the less you will see anything - black line on black background. This might not be a good application for a laser.
