It's Still Alive!

Still playing around with the stale coasters…

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That is a good price, but I am done with these for a while…I really don’t like them…I am going to try to find some bulk bamboo coasters :slight_smile:

It does work, but the speeds needed for a decent etch is painfully slow. I am doing them all as vectors to speed things up, but anything over about 10 IPM doesn’t mark the slate very well. So at full power and 10 IPM a little 4 inch coaster can take 2 hours for the crosshatch toolpath…they look cool and my daughter has taken them all :slight_smile: just not worth the time.

The latest cutting board…I still need to oil this one.

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cool design

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I wanted a little more airflow across my laser etchings so I took 2 old 120mm computer fans from my old g-shield/arduino case and printed two of these. The fan tips forward and backward to direct the airflow:

One of them is already out in the workshop and worked well on my last bamboo cutting board etching. So I decided to print a second one. I got the model from Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:703330

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Today I decided to put some some thin (0.5") padding under the X-Carve, maybe cut down on a little vibration. When I moved the X-Carve I noticed I had almost 2 years worth of sawdust that had worked its way through the holes in the wasteboard. I clean the X-Carve after every carve, but the amount of sawdust underneath was insane. It was from everything I had cut from wood to corian to aluminum…I didn’t take any pictures as I just vacuumed it all up, but I was surprised by how much was there.

I used this under the machine…will it help? Who knows, but it looks good :slight_smile:

I bought these anti vibe pads off Amazon… they seem to work well… better than just having the machine sit on the wood table.

4 Pack of Anti Vibration Pads 4" x 4" x 7/8" All Purpose Super Duty Blue Composite foam Vibration isolation pads https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004HGEPB8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_1GH6yb78W20E4

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Another laser test…a black and white sketch by Frank Frazetta done on chipboard.

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I still have a bit of vibration that I believe is being introduced by the laser mount. I am going to design a new mount that has more mount points. I think having the two screws on the left side and pressure holding on the right is the problem. I’ll post what I come up with.

How long did to take to make that and the Starbucks sign?

What is the depth of those etches?

It took longer to lay out the notebook design in V-Carve then to etch…only about 15 minutes for the notebook and maybe 20 or 30 for the starbucks cutting board.

They were all done with vectors so it went fast. When you engrave a raster image it tends to take longer.

Thanks for this information Erik. I’m currently looking into getting the JTech and was wondering how to speed up the process.

Are you able to adjust the depth of the laser etch with the JTech?

Did yours have an awful smell to them? I was also looking at these;

https://www.amazon.com/Pack-Anti-Vibration-Rubber-isolation/dp/B001THXRP8/ref=wl_mb_wl_huc_mrai_2_dp

Cork helps allow additional dipole cancellation and should work better than foam.

For what I am doing with the laser, depth is not really something I take into consideration. On full power, an etch into the bamboo cutting boards is about half a millimeter. Softer woods I guess you can vary the intensity to vary the depth, not something I have done.

And no smell of the pads that I noticed…they sat in the garage for a week before I messed with them. As far as the vibration dampening of the pads, the vibration I have is only noticeable with the laser as it is much more sensitive than plowing a bit through wood :slight_smile:

Erik, are you sure your lens is not slightly loose? That is the most common source of laser beam vibration. I use Teflon tape and a good spring, and Jeff even uses a dab of hot melt glue, to secure the lens after focusing.

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I can check…I’ll focus and hit it with a drop of hot glue and see how that works.

Focused and used the hot glue…re-running the same one as above with the exact same settings.

Erik, what software are you using with your JTech?

For vector work I am using V-Carve Pro v8.5 and for raster images I am using PicEngrave Pro v5. I use Mach3 as my sender software.

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Yeah, they stunk when I first opened them. They didn’t stink for very long. :joy::nauseated_face::sunglasses:

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