Borax Laser Engraving Revisited

so i did a video a few months ago about improving your laser engraving using borax and you create a solution and spray it on a piece of material and magically things get a whole lot better anyway i did a bit of research and looked at a few more materials and i want to show you the results so stick around how's it going everybody steve here and welcome back to my shop and as i mentioned i did a video a few months ago where i created a borax water solution that i sprayed on baltic birch and it drastically improved the quality of engraving on a photo and if you haven't seen it i'll put a link up here go watch it surprisingly it went it went viral and thousands of people watched it which made me happy but it was definitely shocking uh at any rate some of the questions that came out of that both in in the comments in the video as well as people shooting me some email and having some conversations was can you use this technique for other materials and i thought you know what a great opportunity to kind of do some investigation i like doing a bit of research so what i did in for this video was i put a number of materials that i had just kicking around my shop mostly scraps and you know i sprayed half of it with borax and left half untouched just to see what the effect was and i threw it down on on my muse 3d and did an engraving of an image and you know we'll look at the results here so let's get started so i've stacked up a bunch of materials here i want to i want to try with with borax and what i'll do is i'll divide each of them half and half so we and i'll just engrave an image on them and we'll see what they look like of course we'll start with my old friend baltic birch which i used in the previous video but then i have a pre-finished walnut uh it's actually mdf plywood but it's got a real walnut finish on it and cork somebody asked about cork whether whether borax would have an impact on that we'll give that a try and then we'll try things that are a little more odd like cardboard cardstock and i found a piece of slate tile it's actually from a failed project i had before so i'll use the back and we'll give it a try and see if if it has a difference as well so we'll look at those and see what happens okay so i'll do these on my muse 3d and you can see i i had these are all these round pieces that i had left over from another project and i'll stick this this rose image and it's nice just because it's it's got lots of gray scale in it so uh so i'll use that and it's i'll leave for all of them i'll set them all at 250 by 250 dots per inch and the power for each material will will change it'll be a bit of a guess honestly so you'll just have to try this if if any of these work now to be honest i don't know what any of these are going to do so so it's a surprise to me as well so we'll see what happens anyway i'll give it a shot [Music] [Music] okay so time to take a look at some of the results here i've got this big pile of material and the first one of course is my baltic birch and no surprise it worked very well on the borax side and you saw when i was laser cutting it i actually took three stabs at it by the time i got anything that i could actually see properly so this side is actually almost three times the power of this side this side was 30 percent this side is i think 75 percent power so uh it's just you know it's just crazy so [Music] anyway we'll we'll call that one a a victory borax definitely works now the pre-finished walnut not such a good a good result the borax side and the other side are essentially indistinguishable so we'll call that one a fail we'll throw that one over there cork this one actually had a surprising effect it's it's a little crisper a little darker on this side same power on both of these by the way uh it was only the baltic birch where i changed the power so you can see it's just a little bit better it's not you know it's not like baltic birch where it's night and day literally uh here it's just it's just better cardboard again not really surprised no real distinguishable distinguishable difference slightly darker perhaps on the cardboard side on the borax side but not not anything that would warrant the time basic cardstock aside from the fact that spraying water on the paper made it all all kind of wrinkly on the sides no real impact there so we'll call that one a miss uh same with with slate if you have dreams of making slate engraving darker with borax bad news it just doesn't have any impact at all uh i did have a couple of extra materials which i didn't show at the start i did have a piece of leather i pulled out of my my supply and leather much like cork was just slightly better you can see the water drop down at the bottom it's definitely visible it's definitely crisp on the borax side downside of course you can see it it putting boroc borax on there definitely kind of tinted the the leather so you know you can decide but it did actually improve it made it a little less contrasty so we'll call that one a victory last one here was the [Music] uh was i i had a piece of cherry plywood unfinished and again like baltic birch definitely positive i like this one so much actually that i did a whole one and again you can see the water drop here this is almost photo worthy like this is actually really good so you know this one definitely my favorite so there you have it a number of different materials some of them honestly surprised me that they worked some surprised me that they didn't work uh the best one of course ended up to be this this piece of cherry plywood i had and and i'll show you the image again this thing is just amazing and you know i would definitely recommend doing anything like this if you were going to make a a coaster out of wood and you wanted to put an image on it definitely use this technique spray it with clear coat and and you've got you know a super coaster so anyway hopefully you got a bit out of this video and you know if you're one of those people who uses uh certainly things like cherry plywood or uh leather uh you know definitely give this a try and and see if you like it anyway as always i'll put a video up here go watch that and i'll see you over there and get out there and make your world and i'll see you next time

Channel: Steve Makes Everything

Views: 14,184

Keywords: Steve Makes Everything, Muse 3d, FSL, Full Spectrum Laser, FSLaser, K40 laser, glowforge, co2 laser, Inkscape, laser cutting, laser cutter, laser engraving, engrave, engraving, laser projects, laser cutter projects, laser cutting machine, laser engraving machine, full spectrum muse, Borax Engraving, Borax, Improved Laser Engraving, Improved engraving, Borax Laser Engraving Revisited, laser engraving ideas, laser engraving wood, laser engraving leather

Id: UQgjzIIaOtc

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 08 2022