So, in the category of new stuff, this has been some of my latest project work. The art is by a friend, who asked me to put it on wood for them, so I did. This is cherry, finished in three coats of lacquer before engraving. The laser is an Epilog Mini-18, 30W, the art was processed in Corel before engraving. 
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It seems to work very nicely, I use it for almost all of my engraving projects. It creates a good, waterproof surface that the smoke, resin, etc can deposit on, and wipe off cleanly with a dampened cotton cloth. Sometimes I go back and give the completed engraving a couple more coats to seal it, sometimes I leave it as-is, depends on the effect I’m going for.
hey dan i have a jtech 2.8w laser and when i do engraving the engraved portions are black. i notice a lot of people with the co2 lasers, their projects are wood colored in the engraved parts. is there something you do to get that look or is it just the different types of laser or what?
It’s a matter of power concentration. The diode-type lasers have a very low comparative power, and they make up for it by moving extremely slowly by comparison. Given that slower speed and lower power, it tends to have more time to discolour the wood with the heat. The CO2 lasers tend to use much more power, MUCH faster, which causes the wood to ablate in the beam point, or simply vaporize without a lot of colour change.
Ups and downs to both! I personally really like the dark black effect for a lot of things.
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