New Method for White Tile Engraving: Norton White Tile Principal Component Method

I should also note that I use 14% overscanning on everything, it really helps the edges come out more defined. In addition to doing a line trace over all of my vectors before running the fill.

That seems extreme. I use 2.5% and donā€™t notice any uneveness in the edge. Maybe your accel/decel parameters need tweaking.

Why before? After is built into the profile. You need a new layer to do it before.

Probably could tweak my accel decel parameters but I ended up landing on 14% while running on some Birch plywood, found that was the magic number that kept the edges from getting overburnt. especially as I have been using the fast whitespace scan.

and I run it before as I just seem to get a bit of cleaner results if I run the outline before the scanning.

What size nozzle would work best, maybe a 2mm?

Hi guys, I know this is an older thread, but browsing around I found this article. It seems using some hydrogen peroxide can make ti02 water soluble. Just wondering if anyone wants to give it a go.

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Ok, Iā€™m a complete beginner here, donā€™t even have my new s9 setup yet. So Iā€™m not in a position to test this for a while, as I have alot of learning to do first.

While at work, I had a chemistry nerd friend try to figure out my above linked formula to make ti02 powder water soluble.

This is what he came up with.

1 litre of deionized water. (possible distilled?)

320 grams of sodium hydroxide (lye)

8 grams of hydrogen peroxide

Unknown amount of ti02 powder. (Have to experiment to find saturation point)

Let stand for 24 hours.

This is untested, and experimental.

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very interesting stuff although my question would be is there a benefit to making it water-soluble vs suspending it in ethanol? if it increases the dispersion and thus reduces the granularity of the final results it would be nice!

If it works, the benefits would be a better, smoother application, easy cleanup, and ability to mix batch for long term storage

Still gathering supplies, and slowly getting my setup together, but another thought hit me today.

Again I canā€™t try this just yet, but what if you were to wrap a tile in saran food wrap, then paint on top of it? I would think you would be able to burn the paint straight through, and not have any cleanup whatsoever afterwards.

Dumb idea, or worth a shot?

I think youā€™re going to stink the place up with burning plastic.

and is a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) based plastic that releases hydrogen chloride (HCl), which is highly toxic and corrosive.

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Not to mention using pure TiO2 the cleanup already is very quick with just soap and water.

How is Pure TiO2 diluted?

The method I developed was to suspend it in ethanol at a 3.5:1 ethanol:TiO2 ratio. If you pop open the blog post at the top of this thread I go into pretty specific detail on the mixture and application

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Iā€™m not going to derail this thread anymore, but food wraps are now made of polyethylene, so no risk of hydrogen chloride.

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Iā€™ve been playing with this and Bullseye 123 primer, on an RF-CO2. I find it has a hard limit of about 20mm/s. More and the black does not glassifiy. The power needs to be down to about 4W on a 2" lens. And that sounds like it would be a problem on larger DC-excited CO2 tubes, because they have a dead zone below about 15% of the nominal power where you canā€™t get a lesser power, the tubeā€™s arc goes unstable and output often disappears.

Itā€™s not very practical like that. This is a big, powerful machine and taking 1-3 hrs to do a tile is not very efficient use of time. The makerspace does require ā€œbabysittingā€ (you must remain present while running) and this is approaching 3D-printer-level waiting times you normally need to just do something else with your life. It makes more sense to task a cheaper diode laser engraverā€™s hours with this.

Soā€¦ can we speed it up? Iā€™ve been trying.

More power and/or speed can make a white hole with a black halo burned around it which looks usable on some initial tests, but the way it needs a large halo doesnā€™t work well with adjacent pixels. The microscope view shows clear differences.

I have been hoping to find a way to go faster, generally increasing power proportionately. I tried a comically thick layer of primer, but no luck. At low power, it doesnā€™t reach the tile surface, and then at higher power it cuts a clear white hole with the black missing. No sweet spot.

Tried a masking tape cover, same thing.

Also tried moly dry lube like we use on metal, intending to clean off the extra afterwards. I wasnā€™t successful at higher speeds, it either burns it off entirely or leaves it on the surface. I donā€™t recall if I brought the speed way down for this.

for diodes I know people have been able to successfully at least double those speeds, and I would expect that is probably possible on a CO2 machine as well, although I have not personally tried my hand at it. From what I have read & and seen people have been successful with a 50W CO2 running at 75mm/s. My first question to you would be; have you turned your air assist off? If not you should do so, from what I have read it significantly hamstrings the process.

I did try removing the air assist, but the lens took contamination quickly. And I didnā€™t seem to get appreciably higher speeds delivering the obsidian melt, but I didnā€™t try for long because of the lens.

Black iron oxide is magnetite (Fe3O4), red iron oxide is hematite (Fe2O3). When you oxidize iron, you first get black rust/magnetite, which is adherent to the metal. Further oxidation produces the red rust/hematite which flakes off.

The link at the top of the post does not work for me. It takes me to "broken link"message. Can you tell me what the mix ratios of ethanol and TiO2 are that you used?