Last week was interesting. Again, we were thankfully really busy but I did get a chance to have some fun. I made my coworker a Valentine’s Day present TO GIVE TO HIS GIRLFRIEND. I have to capitalize that since he kept running around saying that I was making him a Valentine’s Day present and left off the important part. Grr. That gift was an exercise in patience as it was done on material that I hadn’t used yet. I am happy with how it came out although not so happy how the pictures came out. I also finally got around to doing my iPod and his iPod. Warning: both look beat up as we’re both somewhat addicted to music. At least mine isn’t as crappy looking as his, scratch-wise. I also got to engrave wood frames for the Department of Veterans Affairs. I was rather pleased with how they turned out.

The wood frames were rather neat as not only did they come out well but I also got to utilize the bed size of our laser. It’s something like 29″ x 17″, whereas our rotary engraver is only 12″ x 12″. I was just barely unable to fit three frames in at once. The accuracy on the laser is amazing.

The neat thing about engraving on wood is working with the grain of the wood. I think the variations make it look more… authentic? It gives it more detail and feeling. Then again, it could just be me. I grew up on a farm and my mom refinished painted wood desks, chests and tables to a natural wood finish.

See? I think that’s gorgeous. And with the laser, even though the frame has a slight curve, we can adjust the focus in order to make a nice, even engraved mark.

Despite Scott’s claims that he was going to take full credit for my design on his Valentine’s Day present TO HIS GIRLFRIEND, he actually did not. And I was happy for that because I did spend a bit of time. This is along the same lines as the baby keepsake that I made in the last post. However, for this project, I used acrylic that was about twice as thick and colored. This gave it a 3Dish effect, although unfortunately that effect is best seen in person. I found some LED lit bases in a catalog that I was dying to make something for and thus Scott ended up being my excuse.

The acrylic is Blasted Hard to take a decent picture of. It’s quite reflective and since some of the details are moreso in the depth of the engraving rather than color, it … doesn’t photograph well. For that, I sincerely apologize. You can see a little more of the detail in the photo once the base is lit.

Their faces both had more to them but again… I suck at photography. I’m sorry. However, when I was getting the picture right, I engraved a regular piece of plastic for practice.

This is an older piece, so the white isn’t quite as white as it would be were it a new piece of plastic. Yes, the age of the piece does matter. But in this you can see a lot more of the faces – they aren’t just white blobs. Scott was disappointed that I cut out the beer in his hand – but who wants to be photographed with a light beer anyway. Siiigh.

Last, we did our iPods to add another item to the “things that we’ve done” list.

Mine is probably slightly cheesy as I’m trying to remind myself to go out and run and do things. Good things. Use my powers for good and all that.

So I wrote a few things in Corel, threw on a flower and some, um, flourishes and bam! MOTIVATION GO! The nice thing about the colored iPods is that they are easy to engrave. Removing the coloring reveals the silver color beneath for a really pretty contrast.

Scott wanted something pretty simple. A worm to go along with the apple. Also, do not ever Google “Angry Earthworm” unless you have safe search on. You get some really weird, disturbing images. I ended up just using some corel clipart that I added googly eyes.

Yeaaaaaah baby! And this concludes my birthday week of projects.

The laser does a freaking fantastic job on acrylic and I love acrylic. I think I have mentioned this before. Glass always frightens me, like I’m going to break it with my giant ham hands (note: anyone who knows me is rolling their eyes at this statement). Aside from which, as the snowflake that we did previously shows, the laser can cut many shapes into laser and have a beautiful, polished edge. Which I probably also mentioned but it bears repeating because I’m so sadly obsessed with my laser.

ANYHOO! Preview time!

Our sister company, Phase Electronics, is an electronic manufacturing contractor. As with any company, we’re always looking for ways to promote and stand out. Circuit boards, when made in a panel (more than one board to a sheet, kind of), usually have a rail around the panel that fits onto the surface mount machine. Basically, it makes mass production of boards easier and gets junked at the end of production. So I naturally felt that we should play with it.

I snapped off the rail and then took a shot. The gold color is the result of removing the top green layer that most people associate with circuit boards. The layer underneath, which actually is gold or copper, depending on the board, comes through if you engrave lightly enough just to remove the green. The text is actually quite small and yet came out so well.

My photo taking skills still aren’t up to par, though.

Trodat, the parent company of Trotec, ever so thoughtfully designed stamp cases that can be laser engraved. As such, we started engraving our logo and the logos of companies that request it on their cases. I want someone to come in and be like, “Hey, these jerks keep stealing my stamp, can you put my name on it?” Alas, that hasn’t happened yet. The stamps remind me of penguins or suits and look ever so sharp. I also really, really like watching the laser at work. I feel like a baby whose parents are playing peek-a-boo. The text magically appears!

That red blur is actually the laser head. It moves too quickly for my little camera to capture it.

Fresh off of the laser! Needs to be cleaned up slightly to get any residual dust off and…

Ready to have the die plate placed on and labels made. Seriously, I know I’m a weirdo, but how cute are these stamps.

So, people like babies, right? And you want to celebrate the birth of your child, or the fact that you had one, or something. Or someone else’s baby, depending on who you are. So I designed an acrylic keepsake, the first of many ideas that I have and just have to sit down, design and implement.

The blue edge is due to the type of acrylic used. I want to get some pink and blue mirror acrylic in, maybe some black too. I think that this type of design can apply to a few other relationships such as love and friendship.

Because this particular acrylic is so clear, putting it on the wall didn’t really make it pop. I mounted it on a clear acrylic base instead.

Front view. And yes, my daughter was really that size.

Side view!

Next week I will have another acrylic piece, this time with a LED lighted base. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Anyhoo. I’ve been meaning to write this entry for a while, especially as one of the projects was a training exercise from when the most wonderful Scott from Trotec was out there showing us how to use our machine. Please note, this part was done around 8pm, when we were all tired, grumpy and hungry. For me, the last two are pretty synonymous.

We wanted to be sure that we could engrave photos before he left. I’d eventually like to do something in marble but for the purposes of this exercise, we had to scale it down to ceramic. First step, choosing a photo:

Seriously, who could ask for a more gorgeous model?

When working with photos, it is important to have a grasp of editing software. The photo doesn’t NEED to be in grayscale, but engraves better as I understand it. We also took out the background image. Since this was done last minute, I honestly could have done better, which will be more evident when you actually see the finished product.

That isn’t the only obstacle, though. When dealing with a new material (and, in this case, a new laser and a noob me), the settings are often off the first time. This is why engraving companies generally purchase more than needed or practice on a similar material. We didn’t have one even remotely close but we did have four coasters, so we popped it in the laser, set it to default settings, and hit go.

Yeah, so that’s what happens when your settings are off. Your dog ends up looking like a freaky ghost. As you can also see, since I didn’t have time to smoothly chop out the background, it appears slightly like something was nibbling at his coast and left perfect bite marks (well, perfect if you had a perfect circular mouth shape).

So we threw the next one in, adjusted the power down and went for it again.

So much better. Seriously. I just wish the camera had accurately captured the white as the light areas actually are more white. Next time I’ll have to take the time to properly remove the background. The general point is that the laser can beautifully capture detail on a medium that most people don’t even think of. Makes a pretty cool gift or display.

Color badges have always been a staple of the engraving industry. I’m biased, of course, but I really think that engraving and color fill (painting) looks better than printing off and laminating or a few other methods which basically boil down to printing. The badges also tend to have a little more to them, thickness wise, which is reassuring when dealing with certain types of people who may or may not be in the habit of being rough on their items (totally not talking about myself in any way whatsoever).

While this mostly was practice in using the laser and laser material for me, I still happen to like how my badge came out. I want a better color blue to contrast more with the black (the RS is blue, my name is in black) but I think that the overall technique is pretty good.

Having a colorful logo next to one’s name makes the company’s brand stand out more and still looks professional. The badge also is slightly beveled, which is something unique with a thicker material VS lamination, which gives it that slight raised edge. This particular one has a black back with a magnetic fixture on it.

Hopefully I’ll be able to update more with this plethora of vitamins fighting off any baddies that try to get into my system – and hopefully more interesting items!

So aside from me being fairly useless, we also had quite a few other projects to attend to. The laser isn’t only for having fun! One of the benefits that I love is being able to run a whole bunch of little tags and having the laser cut them out as well. One of our customers frequently requests small tags (less than 1″ x 2″) to label switches and the laser engraves and cuts out about 75 tags in 17 minutes. That’s nuts, especially compared with how long it used to take us to complete the orders.

So, anyway, I did manage to get a few fun things done this weekend. The teaser is actually from the files that we used to engrave our showcased projects.

This first one is … extremely hard to take photos of. I mean, really. Why did I think a cylindrical object would be something that I should show off?

I mean, look at that. How in the world do you take a photo of that?

So far we’ve done one-off jobs for these but I’d LOVE to do a set for a team. (Hint, hint!)

Next up is the case for my tablet. OK. Look. I grew up around horses and barns and I love the smell of leather. After doing this, I realized I love the smell of non-lasered leather. SHEESH! What an AWFUL smell.

It’s also really hard to take photos of reflect surfaces. Either you have no flash and it looks dull and boring or too much flash and you can’t see the bottom. So, I’m kind of a giant nerd. I love dragons… and cherry blossoms. So I drew myself a very stylized dragon with some cherry blossoms around it. Yup, again, nerd.

In fact, since I drew it, I also signed it and engraved that onto the case. I did take it home last night and scrub it and use some shoe polish on it, which lessened the smell significantly, and thank goodness for that because I was almost prepared to go buy a new case. There are a few tips that I saw for removing the smell that I will have to try when we practice engraving on other pieces of leather.

Andddd finally – my boss trusted me enough to bring her iPad in and let me have at it. The iPad1 and iPad2 have different curves to them so I had to tweak the settings and focus slightly to get it to actually engrave all of it. The iPad1 has a much wider bevel than the iPad2.

Here is a full shot of the iPad. The original peacock was from clip art that we modified to fit around the Apple logo and to add some flourishes to the left side. Michele is a huge fan of the yin-yang and the concept thereof, so I incorporated it into the design. I also made her name is a heavier font to balance out the thickness of the lines in the peacock. She’s really happy with it (which, in turn, makes me a very happy employee).

Here is a close-up of the bottom:

And my favorite shot of it:

I really feel supremely lucky to be able to enjoy my job like this!

I’m slightly late on this, so forgive me. Last week was a bit hectic between being sick and short-handed here. We also were surprisingly busy – usually the first week of the new year is more of a “catching up” kind of week than a manufacturing week. Alas, most of my projects were stamp ones so this week’s work isn’t nearly as fun. Here’s your mini-preview:

This project is an older one. I didn’t take a good picture of it at the time that I did it but I don’t think it’ll hurt anyone to see something “in action” … or at least as in action as a computer will get. My office computer crashed sometime back for some unknown reason and while it was in pieces, I figured I’d make it pretty to pass the time. The artwork is just a clipart that I found and didn’t do much with as I really was just playing with it and wanted to see how it turned out.

The text underneath is very clear in person. It says “custom rubber stamp manufacturing and personalized engraving. Helping you leave your mark since 1990.” If I had thought a little harder, I would have had the flower branch trailing off instead of being such a clearly defined line.

Our second project was for our unofficial mascot, Alex. He participated in the North American Sieger show and his mama wanted to mark the medallion that they received with his information. The laser is perfect for making a dark, permanent mark on metal.

And, even though I had nothing to do with the front, I thought it was very nice so here, you get to see that, too.

And last, we did a knife that was a Christmas present. I teased Scott that this is so that they know who to blame when they find it embedded in my back (he’s a coworker). Since the laser is non-contact, I don’t have to take apart the knife and worry about it possibly smooshing the handle.

Again, I know this was a slow week for the laser and rather uninteresting compared to last week but this coming week we have another iPad to do and a leather tablet case. Excited!

Ahem! Back to the interesting parts. Here’s a little preview of what is under the cut:

I always have a hard time figuring out what to get my dad for Christmas. It was much easier when we both lived in the same state but right now I’m lucky if I get to see him twice a year. Let me say this: my dad is a freaking amazing chef. I know whenever I go to visit him that I’ll be a few pounds heavier than when I left but it’s sooo worth it. And as such, I decided to get him a BBQ set and put that personal touch on it.

View from the top down. I always feel a bit cheesy when I do things like this… but if he likes it, that’s all that matters.

Close up of the BBQ and a shot of the set itself, which I thought was quite nice.

Short background: RS has a sister company (well, at least, it’s owned by the same couple) that manufacturers computer boards called Phase Electronics. We just love manufacturing, apparently. Phase has a customer that we build LED strips for that go into vending machines. This means that we store thousands of LEDs, which are quite small but generally the same, aside from color. Since we have amazing people who bring us large tins of cookies and chocolates, they end up getting re-purposed for LEDs. The boys over in the Phase shop keep thinking of things that they want to have engraved and apparently boredom results in getting the aforementioned LED tins engraved.

Yup, boredom can inspire … greatness?

And now for the pièce de résistance, the iPad2! Suzanne received an iPad for Christmas and wanted to have it personalized. She picked out a beautiful flower and left it to me to decide location, size and how her name was going to look.

Incidentally, taking a picture of that kind of surface is hard! The engraving looks slightly bronze but really it was more silvery/satiny than the matte back. If any photographers read this and want to give me a tip, I’d LOVE to hear it!

Her name was a very delicate, flowy text.

The boys really doubted that the flower wasn’t going to run into the Apple logo. HAH, had them fooled! I actually scanned in the backside of the iPad and then printed out the design on vellum so I could overlay it and make sure that it fit properly and would not hit anything that it wasn’t supposed to, such as the logo or the camera.

And here is a full shot of the iPad. She was so thrilled with how it turned out! And let me tell you, I was terrified to put that equipment on the machine and run it. However, Suzanne’s reaction made it worth the stress and I hope I get to do another one soon!

I thought about it for a bit and settled on a snowflake. I mean, what else better signifies Christmas? Apparently the weather didn’t get the memo, as all we’ve gotten is a bunch of rain. But fine, whatever, let’s just PRETEND it’ll be a white Christmas here outside of DC. So, back to the original thought – a snowflake ornament for my kid with the date. And here’s what we ended up with:

My apologies for the flash. I’m still trying to get this whole “product photo taking” thing down. However, I did manage to get a better shot of it along with one of it being used as a present tag, which is what we’ll do with it this year and then she will have it for decorating in the future!

This photo is slightly better. What the camera didn’t pick up on is that the edges (laser cut!) are actually a really pretty blue color.

And here is the tag in play! I really can’t wait for her to see it – she LOVES little objects, presents, Christmas and things with her name on it. I think I pretty much have all that covered.

I’m not alone, though. Other people like to mark their possessions with their names – or others like to have it marked for them. One of the awesome things about being small is the ability to have a quick turnaround time. In the last 2 days, I’ve gotten a few last minute gifts to mark and thought I’d share them!

The first two pictures are of a shifter knob. This one was a little tricky because of the size and the shape.

To give you an idea of the size – no, I don’t have giant truckasaurus hands. The letters are slightly curved.

On the other end of the size spectrum, the size of the lid of this cooler was approximately 22″x14″. The bed of our new engraver allows us to do muuuuuuuch bigger projects that we did before. I apologize for the quality of this photo but it was taken in the few minutes before they returned to collect their present!

It was like opening a Christmas present. A really, really expensive Christmas present that isn’t mine but that I get to play with almost daily. So what was in the box?

Yeaaaaaaah! Our laser adventures had begun.