I’ve been experimenting with engraving white plastic and have not achieved any successful results yet. Has anyone else tried it out?
I’m planning on engraving these:
But don’t want to sacrifice more then one while figuring out setup. If I can’t get it soon I will plan to CNC very shallow to just break through the white layer.
Any tips or suggestions?
You need to coat the plastic with something very dark so that the laser energy will absorb instead of being reflected. Of course, it would have to be something relatively easy to remove afterwards. Maybe try some masking tape colored black with a Sharpie, although that might only work with the 1.6W laser module.
Great suggestion, I’ll try that out, on a corner.
John here,
I was wondering if the putting the tape over it worked because I was interest in doing something like that.
Best Regards,
John
It did not, but I found out that the main problem I’m having is that the images I load and then export the g-code are being made into solid black blocks instead of the image I intended still trying to figure out what I need to do to get the g-code to match what I intend. From my tests, I think the plain white will work just fine if you have g-code that produces an actual image
I got the solid black block when using grayscale. B&W got the image, but I lost any kind of depth. The way I got around this was to apply a filter (GIMP -> FILTER -> Newsprint) to the image before sending to snapmakerjs.
Try a file in PNG format. I was able to successfully engrave the only one I tried.
