Hi, I just wanted to see if anybody had some tips for lasering glass.
I have a 25w laser. I lasered a sample at 100 speed and 50 power - Was this too much power? Somebody told me to have the text and images at 70% darkness in corel and that it would help.
After lasering the sample of text I could see some chipping in the letters and some “grooves” in the engraved areas from the laser beam. Would lasering out of focus like lasering acrylic help elminate the small grooves.
Any tips would be appreciated.
Yep you’re right, you hit the glass with too much power it will chip off nasty little shards of glass. I’ve found 3 choices.
One option is to place a sand resist over the glass first. Laser though the resist. Then sandblast the resist. This is probably the nicest method for glass but is slower and requires a sandblaster.
A second option is to apply the laser slower to the glass. One trick is to place wet news paper over the glass then etching. Myself, i prefer to run the laser in 2 passes. The first pass will do some etching. The run a second pass to add more of an etched effect. It seems that once the glass has been heated that it no longer wants to break off in shards.
A third option is it use cerimark (sp?). So rather than etching you’d actually be adding a black marking. This is totally different effect but sometimes it’s nice to have a black to work with.