I've been messing with Glass and Mirrors

Yeah, I see more and more of their product now that my son works there. He’s their IT director.

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I never considered French cleats. Good idea!

Thank you for the suggestions I don’t know what I’m doing wrong but i still can not get it to engrave I will continue to try different settings i have even done a material test & tried the settings that seemed to work but cant seem to have it engrave now FRUSTRATING
Thanks again
Angelica

A visible-light blue laser will have extreme difficulty with glass, because the glass doesn’t absorb blue light. You may be able to paint one side of the glass and have the laser heat the paint enough to damage the glass, but it will require considerable experimentation.

Perhaps you can use painted glass as in the first few examples: the laser removes the paint without damaging the glass, leaving a transparent-on-color effect.

My apologies Angelica, I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t realize you were using a Diode laser… something of which I have no experience. There are others here (such as @ednisley) that will chime in with better advice.

Jim

Thanks Jim. I will do some additional research since the backing of mirrors is either a coating of silver or aluminum. Just found out that aluminum when vaporized is not great to breathe in since it can cause flu-like symptoms and irritate eyes nose and lungs.

What produced by burning any of this stuff is?

If you can smell it, you’re breathing it.

:smile_cat:

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Thank you I will definitely try. I believe my laser
I have is red though. But will buy some paint. Thanks for the suggestion

Angelica

These all look wicked!! Please show them off in the official LightBurn Show & Tell Facebook Group.

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Hello Ed, I have been using washable “tempera paint”. I get it at WallyWorld. Just paint it on , (a couple of even coats), let dry and burn. wash off with water in sink. I used my little 10 W. blue light laser , worked just fine. "Sargent Art / Art-Time / washable tempera paint. Give this a try.
Randy C.

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I just now tried a piece of broken glass and a small compass image on it. First I painted it with black tempera paint(2-coats), dry then just minutes ago, I burned with a 20 watt diode using 40/60 (inches-min/power). This was just plain scrap windows glass from Lowes. It actually worked! It did burn through two places. I forgot to set the layer/cut to “Threshold”, my bad. Image turned out sort of Ok but was obvious I used too much power. Not as clean as I had hoped. More glass scrap to obtain and practice more!

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I found that flat black spray paint works verywell too

But does it wash off easily?

I use fingernail polish remover or just plain acetone

As soon as I get some more glass to mess with, I’ll certainly give that a try. Thanks

I’d been using my CO2 laser to engrave glass for a while but hadn’t tried playing with mirrors much until this thread inspired me to try it. After the usual tests and experiments the posted photo is of a mirror sign for my sister’s creative space. She’s a fabric artist / maker that loves to work with her grandchildren there. The name is what my nephew, one of her sons, calls the place.

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Very Nice. What are you using for your color?

Thanks. It was a quick, fun, project. The mirror is a 12" sq. tile from IKEA.

The blue paint is brushed on dollar store metallic acrylic. The black outline is also acrylic. The gold is a spray can lacquer. I tried a gold metallic acrylic but couldn’t get the even fill that I wanted. The gold spray lacquer worked well.

The red is from an old can of automotive touch up paint I had kicking around. As some of the colours were somewhat transparent, I finished with an overcoat of sprayed black enamel.

The frame was just a quick job using 3 layers of 1/4" birch ply and finished with shellac and wax.

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