I spent Christmas at my parents house. My dad got a laser engraver recently, but hadn’t figured it out yet. It only came with assembly instructions. Nothing at all for how to burn. The few things he’d tried, it burned the board to a crisp.
We spent hours figuring it out today, and it was well worth the research.
This isn’t the first project we burned using his engraver, but it’s my favorite
I burned this shoebill for @roler. I love how it looks! This is burned on a poplar board my dad had lying around. It was perfect and burned beautifully.
I suggested we crop the image, but he didn’t understand why I was suggesting it. So after that attempt left a lot of blank space (we might try to add a rope and/or anchor border later. He kept that one for himself), we cropped and burned again. we also changed a few more settings.
We had a few other small burns that were epic fails. I didn’t take pictures of any of those. I did leave a stack of 8x10 wood pieces to burn and a sloth I really wanted. We’ll go back over tomorrow and pick up my sloth and probably play more with his laser engraver. I had a lot of fun!
It can if you burn too hot. It melts the wood instead of gently burning the design on. If you do it right, the smell dissipates within the hour. You can also seal your finished piece and that will make it go away… but then it smells like your sealant.
These look really good and super detailed! That’s frustrating that there were no instructions for something that clearly needed them, but it’s really nice that you were able to spend quality time with your dad figuring it all out together!
