Laser engraver for carving patterns.

[dikman]

I've been thinking of making a dress belt but I'd like to have another go at carving at the same time.  Stohlman's book Belts Galore has an oak leaves and acorns pattern which looked nice. Then I thought (always dangerous!) could I use my new laser engraver to very lightly etch the pattern to use as a cutting guide, rather than the usual tracing method? My Stohlman book is a .pdf so it wasn't too hard to copy and paste the pattern into photoshop to make it a suitable size and get rid of the stippling that he draws in. A trial run on some cardboard shows that it should work. 

There are two problems, however, the pattern is only a short section and has to be repeated several times to make up the length of the belt. Locating the pattern accurately each time is going to be tricky and I will need a jig of some sort so the belt can be moved along within the laser's frame and not move out of alignment. I whipped up an adjustable guide thingy out of plywood that should work (not pretty but the leather doesn't care!) and magnets around the edges of the board should keep it in place. While writing this it suddenly occurred to me that as my engraver has a bed width of 400mm I could join two or three of the pattern elements in photoshop so I could engrave the longest run in one go, this will minimise the joins I need to make. Hmmm. Lots of experimenting needed (using cardboard) to work out how to accurately locate the laser beam each time.

Has anyone tried anything like this?

[Dwight]

Yessir . . . been too busy with holsters to really jump into the belt thing . . . but I most certainly will be doing that.

I tried one application of the oak leaves . . . did the cardboard thing first . . . liked it . . . tossed a piece of junk leather in there for kicks and giggles . . . turned out too dark . . . have to try again some future date.

My plan is to bring the two pieces of the belt just close enough together that the laser does not "overlay" the etching . . . and I'll go in there with my cutting and stamping tools and join them together.

Got two large semi-autos that hit the shop the other day . . . both have attached lasers . . . making holsters for them . . . and it is a "chore" for sure.

Gotta get them done . . . plus a half dozen belts . . . then "Lord willing" I may get to go back to playing and experimenting.

May God bless,

Dwight

Edited March 26, 2024 by Dwight

[toxo]

1 hour ago, dikman said:

I've been thinking of making a dress belt but I'd like to have another go at carving at the same time.  Stohlman's book Belts Galore has an oak leaves and acorns pattern which looked nice. Then I thought (always dangerous!) could I use my new laser engraver to very lightly etch the pattern to use as a cutting guide, rather than the usual tracing method? My Stohlman book is a .pdf so it wasn't too hard to copy and paste the pattern into photoshop to make it a suitable size and get rid of the stippling that he draws in. A trial run on some cardboard shows that it should work. 

There are two problems, however, the pattern is only a short section and has to be repeated several times to make up the length of the belt. Locating the pattern accurately each time is going to be tricky and I will need a jig of some sort so the belt can be moved along within the laser's frame and not move out of alignment. I whipped up an adjustable guide thingy out of plywood that should work (not pretty but the leather doesn't care!) and magnets around the edges of the board should keep it in place. While writing this it suddenly occurred to me that as my engraver has a bed width of 400mm I could join two or three of the pattern elements in photoshop so I could engrave the longest run in one go, this will minimise the joins I need to make. Hmmm. Lots of experimenting needed (using cardboard) to work out how to accurately locate the laser beam each time.

Has anyone tried anything like this?

Not the same but I'm having a similar problem with the foiler ie lining things up. The letters/stamps point downward and then you have the foil between the stamps and the leather so you have to ensure everything is lined up before you pull that lever.

400mm sounds enormous. My diddy Laser does nothing like that.

[Ferg]

My 2cents: Why don't you layout your design so you have enough design to do less than half the belt area you need for the design. Leaving several inches of space between the two designs in the "rear" portion. You don't need to be quite as fussy with alignment but it shouldn't be any big deal.

Worth a try?

[dikman]

Just spent two days trying to figure out why I couldn't tack on another image to my test piece. Part of it was outside the area covered by the engraver but I figured Lightburn would just chop it off at the limit point. I was getting all sorts of line and image layers but nothing would burn! Finally worked out that if part of the image falls outside the work area Lightburn will not process anything!!!!

So I tried burning it into a scrap piece of leather and it worked well. I dampened the leather to try tooling it but it doesn't cut or tool easily. It's very old leather given to me with a lot of other stuff and appears to be a "hard" leather. I might try casing it with saddle soap and see if that helps.

It's also occurred to me that maybe I don't need to use a swivel knife, perhaps if I can get the burn depth right I can simply use the engraver to "cut" the pattern and then just tool it? Have to give it a try.

[Bert03241]

this something I've been wanting to try on my laser. yes you can  engrave the Pat then cut it out, may cut it with the laser then background,  theres a video on here someplace of a guy showing how to do it, but I forgot were its at, some place in 3d printers and lasers I think. I'll look

found it

 

 

Edited March 28, 2024 by Bert03241
add video

[billybopp]

10 hours ago, dikman said:

Just spent two days trying to figure out why I couldn't tack on another image to my test piece. Part of it was outside the area covered by the engraver but I figured Lightburn would just chop it off at the limit point. I was getting all sorts of line and image layers but nothing would burn! Finally worked out that if part of the image falls outside the work area Lightburn will not process anything!!!!

So I tried burning it into a scrap piece of leather and it worked well. I dampened the leather to try tooling it but it doesn't cut or tool easily. It's very old leather given to me with a lot of other stuff and appears to be a "hard" leather. I might try casing it with saddle soap and see if that helps.

It's also occurred to me that maybe I don't need to use a swivel knife, perhaps if I can get the burn depth right I can simply use the engraver to "cut" the pattern and then just tool it? Have to give it a try.

That looks nice!  If you're doing a full length belt, consider turning it by 90 degrees so that the rest of the belt can hang out front to back and not interfere with movement of the laser tracks at the side.  Also, consider putting a small index mark at the very edge of the belt, and one on your jig to help alignment as you move on to the next segment of the pattern. If the index on the belt is small enough, you can probably remove it as you bevel the edges.  As for, using the laser in place of a swivel knife, it might work but unless you can adjust power to change depth of cut on the fly you will not get some of the finer control of trailing off lines that you'd have with a swivel knife.  Even if you CAN control that depth it's likely a lot of work to get the software to do what you want.  That's probably worthwhile if you intend to make a lot of the same belts, but likely not worthwhile if you're making just a few.

Just my thoughts

- Bill

 

 

[Northmount]

Moved to 3d printers and lasers

[dikman]

Thanks for moving it, Northmount, the thread has grown bigger than I intended.

Bert, thanks for the vid, for some reason it didn't occur to me to search youtube (which is odd considering how much time I spend on it ).

Billybopp, the plywood "base" under the leather is not fixed, unlike the metal sheet underneath that which is screwed down. I have engraved a line in the metal as an aid in lining up the plywood, but you're right, if I make an alignment line in the other axis I can then make indexing marks which should give me some degree of consistency (at least within a couple of mm). More fettling required.

As for the depth of cut, I hadn't thought about that. It is certainly possible to vary the power for different lines but that has to be done in the design stage by creating different layers. With an imported image like I'm using that can't be done as it's all one layer so all cuts are the same depth. More thought required.

My next step, however, is to use a smaller image and experiment on a decent piece of veg, one that can be cased properly.

[Bert03241]

If you convert your image to a vector then you can change line colors thus making line of different depths.