Wine Glass Engraving- Fantastic Results!

hey everyone it's Greg from the laser Channel join me as I engrave this wine glass using lightburn software [Music] welcome back to engrave this class there's just a few steps to do this I'll start by showing you the placement of this particular rotary unit inside of the machine the placement of the glass on the rotary the design of the artwork in light burn software and then finally doing the actual engraving on the glass so that covered the materials for this project that are needed is any type of laser engraving machine this particular model is the atom stack a20 Pro featuring the 20 watt laser module however this project can be done with a 5 10 or 20 watt laser next of course is a rotary unit I highly suggest using one that has this auxiliary wheel set off to the side that will support one side of your piece of glass next up is we'll need to apply some type of a masking paint to the glass and for that my go-to paint is black temper paint it has no fumes applies easily and has simple water cleanup I apply that paint using my preferred method is an airbrush this particular airbrush is a crescendo 175 it retails I think for around a hundred dollars hundred and twenty dollars but I bought that 20 years ago so I expect that to be quite a bit more expensive alternatively I also have a 10 Harbor Freight airbrush and I've used that for projects just like this and it works perfectly fine continuing on I like to have some type of a teaspoon tablespoon measuring set because I will be watering down the paint a little bit so it sprays easier that ratio is one part water to two parts pan the next thing I like to keep in my work area is a steel ruler or a plastic one I like this one because it has millimeters on one side an inch on the other side I'll be using this to gauge the width of the artwork that I'll be placing on the glass so it's not too narrow and not too wide optional materials for this project include blue painters tape I'll use this to put on a glass when I'm doing a new design I'll engrave just the tape that way I can check for the placement and the size of my image without actually engraving the glass speaking of the glass to Hope Place it on the rotary unit I like to keep one of these key chain levels around my workspace I'll use that to roughly level out the glass while setting the focus of the laser head for those of you who do not have an airbrush or don't want to invest in one just yet the paint can still be applied to the glass using a foam brush I use this at full strength paint I typically put a little bit of paint on a paper plate and dab that brush onto the top and I use the dab method to go around this doesn't produce a very clean and smooth consistent finish and your engraving will kind of show up with a texture sometimes you want that and other times you don't and if you're in a rush and you don't have a foam brush alternatively you can use one of these crinkly shopping bags just Bunch it up a little bit dab it in some regular full strength temper paint and dab that on top allow the glass to dry and then reapply more paint until it's roughly opaque with this covered let's hop into installing the rotary into the machine before I place the rotary unit inside of the machine I want to make sure that I have a backer board down that way if for some reason the laser misses the glass that's on the rotary unit I'm not directly marking into my table so this piece of aluminum that I have is from a piece of honeycomb that I have I don't need the honeycomb but the backer board is a perfect plate to protect my table the first part here is quick and easy to place the rotary unit inside of the machine work area on this atom stack machine I read through the manual and they would like the drive belt facing towards the three o'clock position with the open end of the glass facing towards the nine o'clock position for me my best method I've found to square up the rotary unit is to use the frame of the machine for that I grab a flat straight board and I place that on this top guy entry Rail and I slide this forward and tell it just about touches that rotary attachment then looking down from the top I just make sure that it is nice and squared up to place this attachment wheel next to the rotary attachment there are some guidelines that are on here to make sure that the wheel is square to the rotary attachment again I'm just going to peer down through the top and get that lined up and I'm making sure that everything is in line and centered the last thing to do is to disconnect the connector off of this drive motor for the y-axis and to plug in the rotary attachment into that connector some of this might vary a little bit on machine to machine but it's very common for these rotary attachments to plug into the harness that is on the y-axis of your machine the y-axis again being this direction on the machine the next thing that I like to do is to place the glass onto the rotary unit and this is the really neat thing that I like about this wheel attachment that comes with the atom stack is they have two guide Wheels per side and those two guide Wheels form a v-groove and I like to place this bottom lip of that glass into that Groove and that keeps the glass in place and as it's engraving it cannot shift back and forth as I just mentioned before one of the optional pieces of equipment for this project is a level and I like to place this level on the area that I think I would like to have the graphic on the glass I can move my laser module over that and set the focus with the focusing tool and here I've got the laser module is too close I'm going to move that up just a little bit and I'm checking one side and I move over and again that looks pretty good the laser set in Focus within about a millimeter and whenever you have a curved glass that's about the best that you can really hope for is one to two millimeters at about three millimeters you'll start seeing that your engraving might be a little bit inconsistent but it all depends on the type of glass that you're using and the size of the image that you're using and the last thing that I'd like to do is manually position the laser so that it's sitting over the 12 o'clock position of the glass with this step complete I'm ready to jump into light burn and make a design inside light burn I have my a20 Pro selected and the first thing that I'd like to do is make sure that my enable rotary and the setup button shows up if yours does not navigate over to edit settings and there'll be a check box here show rotary enable on Main window enabling that for my graphic I'm just going to type in the laser Channel I'll zoom in a little bit and I want the text to all be centered up but right now it is left Justified if I select the text and navigate up towards the top here we'll see the Align is set up to the left I can drop this menu down and go middle and now everything is centered up just the way I would like it the next thing I'd like to do is draw a box around this and it doesn't have to be perfectly centered at this time and I'd like to round the corners on this box so I'm going to go to the radius tool and select something like 0.1 inches and select the box and the radius tool and when I zoom in you'll see that my mouse changes to a little crosshairs that means that this radius tool will work I'll go around to each of the four corners that looks good with this box I just drew selected I'm going to offset it and I like the way this looks what I want is just a nice border around this and if I'm not sure what's going to engrave or what's not going to engrave I can navigate to the top of the screen and click on this preview button everything in Black Will Be An engraving for this project so I do have this border will show up engraved and I'd like the text to show up a little bit larger so I'm going to grab this corner and stretch that out a little bit and for this video I'm going to make sure that it's purposely offset a little bit so that I can show you that when I select everything or hit Ctrl a to select everything on the screen I can navigate up to the top menu bar to align everything on the screen that'll make sure the text is exactly in the middle and all of our offsets here are correct with my ruler I'm going to measure what would be roughly about three quarters of the width of the glass and see that on this particular one it's about two inches wide would be what I want the size of the graphic to be once again in light burn Ctrl a to select everything and I'll navigate to the top here making sure that this lock pad here is closed meaning that when I change the width the height will follow in the same ratio I'm going to switch this to two inches wide and I like the way that that looks the next thing I need to do is rotate my graphic so that the top of the graphic will be the top of the glass in this case in the machine the opening of the glass is at the nine o'clock position and light burn software I'm going to grab the corner of the graphic click and drag if I hold down the shift it will move the graphic in 15 degree increments until I get to 90 degrees my graphic is now facing at the nine o'clock position my job origin is still at 12 o'clock I want to switch that to the nine o'clock position for this first part of the project because I've never done this graphic before on this particular type of glass I'm going to do a test engraving using the blue painters tape and I know from referencing my journal book from when I last used the blue painters tape that is setting of 80 millimeters per second at a power level of about 15 percent will engrave the tape without cutting through the tape and if you're wondering I tried using the blue painters tape as a masking tape for Engraving the glass itself and while the laser Burns through the tape very well when it gets to the adhesive it basically absorbs all the power and none of that power gets to the actual glass where it can etch or excuse me it can etch or engrave the glass so it's been tried with these diode lasers it doesn't seem like it's possible to use masking tape as a masking agent to engrave the glass next step for me is to put the tape on the glass I like doing this little extra step it doesn't take very long and it's a great way to make sure that I'm thinking about the placement of my graphic on my project material and I'm going to place the tape about two inches from the top of the glass in my shop I typically do not put any engraving on any drinkware within two inches of the drinking lip of the glass that way if somebody drinks from the glass their lips accidentally don't touch the Engraving I have a second piece of tape cut and when I do this it's okay for the tape to overlap a little bit and because I am putting flat tape on a curved surface there will be some wrinkles that develop that's perfectly okay I'm just going to use my finger and iron those down and I like the way that looks and I'm ready to place this back into the rotary fixture and here's a quick little tip I'd like to show you if I navigate over to the move tab you'll see that I have this fire button if I click on that I will have the laser will fire at a very low power level if you don't have that navigate over to edit device settings and on this screen you'll see enable laser fire button and there's another tab laser on when framing this is a really neat feature that I like when I go to frame out the graphic on the image this laser will fire at this low point five percent and I'll see exactly what the laser travel path is I have mine enabled it all looks good connect my machine up to the laser and double checking my speed is at 80. my power is at 15 I did set the focus I have the air assist on at a very low amount and when I frame I can see that I am completely covering all of the tape and the other neat thing about this preview button as I'll see that this will take about five minutes to do this test engraving on the glass on the blue painters tape going to hit start and I'll see you in about five minutes the test engraving turned out perfect carefully removing the glass from the setup to make sure I don't disturb anything and I like the placement of the graphic on the glass it's not too high and it's not too low however we're going to notice something here is that the top of this box is actually tapered in and that's because that's following the taper of the glass as the glass diameter gets smaller the graphic gets smaller and this is going to be apparent on any type of project material that you turn on a rotary unit that has any paper or curvature to it there is a way to overcome this and I'll show you that very briefly in Adobe Photoshop inside Photoshop I drew the same graphic I just engraved on the glass if I navigate to edit free transform or actually transform and I go to perspective I can grab this corner and when I move that corner out to compensate you'll see that it moves the other side it's a really great little trick to do and this type of glass that taper would need about a five percent now I know not everybody is using a graphics software package like Photoshop but I just wanted to show you that this taper of your graphic image that'll show up on all tapered glassware there is a way to compensate for that however I've purchased glassware from various events and things from uh souvenir shops where they engrave or they print their graphic and they don't compensate on it so it's really up to you as the Artist as the engraver to leave it as is or to try and compensate that and there's no exact science for getting that perfectly that's why I like to use this blue Panthers tape before I start painting the glass I want to make sure that all my fingerprints are removed off the outside and the inside of the glass along with any dust or any residue that might be on the glass if I leave that behind it might accidentally engrave the glass in that portion my Prof preferred chemical to use as either a Windex or in this case a denatured alcohol works very well and this is the nice thing about using stemware is I can just handle the glass by the stem and clean everything inside and out painting the water-based temper paint onto a smooth glass without it running can be very tricky the best tip that I can offer is to warm up the glass with a blow dryer or a space heater before applying the paint now note that I said warming up the glass don't make the glass so hot that when the cold paint hits it it cracks or shatters the glass and between each coat of paint I'll be putting the glass back in front of the heater to quickly dry the paint I can easily get four coats of paint on this glass in well under five minutes I'll show you the first coat of paint I put on the glass along with the last coat and here's my very fancy paint booth and it's a box on top of a garbage can and this I've been using for quite some time and it works out really really well for this first coat I want to make sure that I put on a very light coat I'll barely be able to see the paint coating on here and this acts as a base coat for all the future coats of paint to stick to off to the side I'm going to make sure I've got a good spray pattern and just spray horizontally across and then vertically across for that first coat that's all the more paint I'm going to put on it's just a light dusting of paint I'm going to go over to the space heater and dry this off here's what the glass looks like with three coats of paint each coat I can put on heavier than the last coat and it doesn't take very long at all here I'll apply the fourth and final coat of paint while I grab my airbrush just want to remind you for me and the airbrush that I use I use one part of water to two parts paint to water down the paint to go through the sprayer my air compressor is setting is at about 25 psi to spray the paint clear the gun out and I just use some vertical sprays back and forth and now some horizontal that's a nice even coat of paint I have a nice even coat of paint on my glass I check this by holding it up to the light to make sure that I don't have any spots that are too dark or too light these will show up as lighter or darker in Gray beans if it's too extreme on the glass so want to make sure that once again any over spray from the paint is cleaned off from the inside of the glass along with the back side of the glass I do know that there is the option when I paint the glass to place it upside down inside my fancy paint booth to make sure that there's no overspray in side the glass however I found that I get some paint that collects around the rim and that becomes a little bit more difficult to clean off so I find for me this works well but choose your own method that works best for you the last thing that I like to do is I check each side of the glass on where I have the most consistent paint applied to it and I put a finger on each side of where the consistent paint starts and directly in the middle I take my fingernail and I put a little Mark that's the center of the masking paint that I just applied I'm going to use that Mark to make sure that it faces straight up towards the laser I would like to have a power setting of 70 percent everything looks good I'm ready to put my goggles on and start the Engraving and again because we're running at the same speed only the power level change this project will take about five minutes the glass just finished up I think it turned out great I'm going to turn off some of the noise here and removing that out looks just like it did on that blue masking tape that we did the trial run on here's a close-up view of that before I wash the temper paint off I think this is my favorite part of the project is where I get to get some water and rinse off that tempera paint one final rinse and I'm ready to dry this off and one more close-up that is a nice clean etching that can be spotted from very far away I really enjoyed creating this project and this video Just For You viewers if you like this video and you like the content please like subscribe or leave a comment down below doing any number of those things really helps the channel out and it connects great content like this with great viewers like you until next time learn create and share

Channel: The Laser Channel

Views: 21,310

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Id: 0ik723q85Pc

Length: 23min 31sec (1411 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2022