I just did a test with vector engraving on 19mm thick Merbau hardwood.

Lasers Created With Laser
1

I just did a test with vector engraving on 19mm thick Merbau hardwood.

I set the piece in position with the focal depth approximately half way through the 19mm. I did this by removing my cutting bed & putting some blocks of scrap wood underneath with some pop rivets nailed in 15mm deep to support the piece. Then I realised I had to find origin point somehow, so I used magnets to hold my MDF guide in place on the bed support rods.

Settings I used were 4mA @ 25mm/s. 0.5mm wide vertical rectangles spaced 0.25mm apart (for the vector engrave). Covered the entire area with the rectangles & then punched out the logo.

Observations

  • I’ve noticed since switching to CorelDraw x5 that when I import composite paths from Adobe Illustrator 9 format files, they do some really weird behaviour with lines going everywhere. Totally unusable. So instead of using composite path for the vector rectangles, I just grouped them & imported AI9 & it works perfectly.
  • 0.5mm wide vertical rectangles spaced 0.25mm apart seems to be a good size & spacing for this particular material. Vertical lines seems to minimise the vibrations & cause less issues.
  • Slightly jagged edges, due to the vector engrave process. Could possibly be remedied by doing a final cut in the logo shape (to smooth those edges).
  • Using the vector engrave method is so much quicker than normal engrave. I won’t even bother with normal engrave any more. This took ~9 minutes to complete (91mm x 91mm).

Finishing

  • I cleaned up the piece using straight methylated spirits with a nail brush & scrubbed the whole surface area. If you look closely at the pictures you will see there is a slight difference in the black areas once cleaned up.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the results. I did the SHIELD logo, just for you @Dennis_Fuente as I recall you saying you liked SHIELD too on one of my previous tests.

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2

Wow… that turned out really great… I’ll have to try this out on something aswell… thanks for the great details.

3

@Gunnar_Stefansson Yeah, it turned out as I’d hoped, but my hopes were not high for it to turn out as well as it did. I’m fairly satisfied.

4

Added a couple of extra points to the observations that I forgot to mention. - Time taken & - extra note about the vertical lines for the vectoring.

5

I try to use vectors for engraving as you noted it’s much faster. Except there are some things that don’t “vector” well and a raster engrave will result in a better image. Stuff that you’d look at as a grayscale type of image for instance end up with vector paths that can often just turn into blobs by the time it hits the laser. Trial & error until you get enough under your belt for experience to tell you which way to go.