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.

[dikman]

To change it to vector I have to use the trace function first, which gives me a vector image, but I can't see anywhere in Lightburn that will let me isolate individual or part lines into different layers (it may be there but I haven't figured it out if it is). I have successfully changed the image to a vector but the linework is too thick and when I engrave it and then run the swivel knife over it I'm left with an "outline" or edging from the burning alongside the tooling. Searching has shown that Adobe Illustrator will let me convert the thick vector lines to a thin line using the artwork function, but I don't have Illustrator (nor am I about to buy it!) and thus far I haven't found any other programme that can do this function.

It looks like I'm heading down another rabbit hole.

30 mins. later: ok, it looks like I need to duplicate the image and assign a different colour layer to each duplicate (as many times as I need to vary individual lines). This still wouldn't allow for a line that tapers in cut depth along its length, this would have to be done manually with a swivel knife. Plus each layer would need editing to remove parts that don't need cutting. I've been dabbling in Inkscape to use as a suitable drawing programme but it's far from being user-friendly or intuitive. Overall it seems a clumsy way of doing anything.

Whilst engraving the lines is great to use the cut as a guide for the swivel knife it looks like the best way is going to be finding the settings that only just engrave the image with just enough burning to see the outline and leave a minimal marking on the leather and then use the swivel knife normally.

Edited March 31, 2024 by dikman

[Bert03241]

I don't know anything about Lightburn and very little about Inkscape. I use coreldraw. I ungroup everything , then I make everything a hairline. Then I can assign each line a color, and set power and speed to what ever I want.

[dikman]

Interesting, that's good to know. I downloaded an earlier version of Coreldraw but being a trial version it won't let me import images so isn't very useful. I'll look into it further.

[dikman]

Another few hours down the rabbit hole (it's getting bloody deep!). Finally figured out how to import a file into Coreldraw, managed to ungroup and apply the hairline but there's no way to save it, believe it or not the window that opens up for it extends down off the screen and I can't find a way to move it up! Also, Coreldraw won't let me save it as an .svg file, only a .cdr file. I can import the .cdr into Inkscape, and then save it as an .svg but when I import that into Lightburn the the laser tracks the image but doesn't actually turn on the laser to burn. All very bizarre. My laser is quite capable of burning a very fine line - but thus far I can't convert my image to do that.

My language has been somewhat colourful of late.

[toxo]

I don't know how many times I've said I'd like to learn this stuff.  I use Fireworks MX2004 and I can do a lot of basic stuff but not even a tiny fraction of what it's capable of.

Trouble is if I try to go further I get a headache and in six months time I've forgotten it and have to learn it all over again.

[dikman]

Well, I finally got a fine line image that printed a, well, fine line. Thanks Bert, for letting me know it could be done. It's been a long frustrating process!! One of the issues that wasted a lot of time is that the trial version of Coreldraw won't let you save an .svg file. Virtually anything else can be saved but not that, nor do they tell you that. My solution - save it as a Coreldraw file (.cdr) then import it to Inkscape and then save it from there as .svg. Slightly convoluted but it works. The other issue is that the version I'm using (X7) has a bug that doesn't always let you convert a .bmp to RGB, which creates a save error. There were other issues too, but I won't bore anyone with them. Now that I have a slight understanding of the process I'll try and find a free programme that will do what I need.

It's also occurred to me that maybe I don't need to tool something like a narrow belt, if I can lightly burn the pattern on the belt, use the swivel knife to lightly add the missing details and then apply antique paste it should subtly highlight the cut pattern? Something to think about.

[dikman]

Yay! I finally found out how to convert my .jpg/.bmp image into a vector .svg file in Inkscape AND end up with thin lines!

Inkscape is pretty good, for a free programme, but is not user-friendly or intuitive. I'd better write all this down before I forget how to do it.

[Bert03241]

I use coreldraw 5 which I bought years ago took me a while to figure it out and like everything I only use about 5% of what it can do. I last year I started getting message from corel that my copy was illegal and I had to buy a new copy,  well screw that I paid good money for this program many years ago , I beached to corel but they wouldn't listen . A friend of mind had the same problem but he found a hack that lets us still use the program , but you have to apply the hack about every third time you open corel kind of a PITA but at least I can still use it.

I found that inkscape works better then corel to convert images to vectors so if I have to I use inkscape to convert then import to corel.

Glad you found a solution that works for you.

 

Edited April 3, 2024 by Bert03241