It’s no secret that I’ve got a whole lotta’ love (cue up Jimmy Page guitar riff) for our local animal shelter, so when they came rubbing around my leg looking for a tidbit for their annual “Wags, Whiskers, & WiFi” auction I was happy to play along.
Wags, Whiskers, & WiFi is usually their biggest fundraising event of the year and they come up with a wide variety of nice items to auction which (being Sonoma county) usually includes some nice wines or champagne, possibly along with a picnic basket of food or some other “goes nice with wine” type items.
I was asked if I’d be willing to etch their logo on a set of 4 glasses to go along with a bottle, and either wine glass or champagne flute would be great they didn’t care which. It was also mentioned that they might put up a nice bottle of scotch or gin and that if rocks glasses were easier to do than wine glasses that would be fine instead.
I went and dug through my shed and had a small assortment of glassware “in stock” but I couldn’t decide which ones to do.
When the dust cleared I had this little pile to donate.
It was fun and it goes to a great cause…
I, too, am a supporter of my local animal shelter and bear center and am very impressed with the results on glass! Would you be willing to share your technique?
Ahh, it always does my heart good to run across other folks who support their animal shelters.
Not much special to the glass technique…
80W CO2 laser, chuck type rotary.
I get the best texture by running fairly fast, usually ~400mm/sec, but speed and power depend on the glass and the artwork. I used 425mm/sec @ 15% power (~6.5mA) for the ones in that photo.
I usually use a 2" lens and 0.09mm interval.
And air assist. I think that a good hard stream of air helps give a better texture. I assume that it’s due to a quicker cooling of the area. Dunno.
Not all glass behaves the same so a having a sacrificial glass from the same batch that you can play with to dial in best settings is a good thing.
But your profile suggests you have a diode laser, so of course none of the above will be applicable to your machine. Doing glass with a diode laser is an entirely different game.
Bear center? Where’s your bear center?
Do you help socialize them for adoption?
Thank you for the information. Perhaps some day I’ll have a C02 laser!
The ‘bear center’ I referred to is the North American Bear Center in Ely, Mn. (bear.org) I’ve been working with bears since…well, a long time. LOL I am now the exhibit curator for the museum. Come visit!
I simply pick a test shape and try it on glass with a bunch of different intervals and see which one looks best.
I kind of like a star for my test shape. The center provides a nice open area where it’s easy to see the texture of the engraved area, and where it tapers to points will show artifacts that can help dial in power level. (too much power often starts to show up first as chipping in those tight little corners)
Start with an interval that’s obviously too wide and shows spaces between lines and keep tightening up the interval a little at a time until it looks nice. Too small some times causes obvious banding in the large etched areas or it just doesn’t look as good.
I think we’ve never met, but your name and its HSSC connection are familiar to me.
That place is so awesome. I adopted a cat there that had arrived as a very badly injured stray and I was so amazed with the quality of “care & repair” that he received from shelter med and so many other folks there that I pledged to volunteer for 6 months.
That was 5 years ago and I’m still there and I’m pretty much non-stop impressed with the amount of good that happens at that place.
Love the work they do and always happy to support them when I can.
