As an IT Guy and also a proud father, I’m used to drink a lot of coffee. This year I found a startup which offers really good and strong coffee, if not the world strongest (237 mg caffeine/10g coffee). Since I’ve ordered my first bag of freshly roasted beans, I got in touch with the community which is also pretty awesome.
What this has to do with laser engraving or Endurance you might think. I will tell you the story behind this.
As said, I’m pretty happy with the coffee, and also ordered some merch. But as I own an Endurance laser I wanted to create something special for me with their logo on it.
Let me tell you about the process.
Endurance Lasers, as you may know can be used with any CNC machines or 3D Printers. We often share the various applications possible with these devices but so far, we rarely talk about the type of materials compatible with them.
Slate itself is a great material to work with. Several months ago, before I’ve got my 10w Endurance laser, I engraved on slate with my 2.5W Laser. So I started with the same settings as before. Means, running the laser at about 20mm/s and full power. But the first outcome was far away from what I was expecting. As you see in the picture below:
After this came out I was pretty unhappy with the result. But was remembering a post of an Endurance member about improving the laser engraving quality on slate. So I coated the next slate piece in a thin layer of transparent glossy paint. And also did some test engravings with different speeds and laser powers as you can see here.
And I found the best combination of speed and laser power using my laser on my cnc machine (which was 50mm/s at 90% Power) and continued with the pieces I’ve prepared and ended up with this:
At the end I was able to break the time per piece down from 1.5 hours to about 17 minutes by finding the best combination of speed and power.
And I was so happy about the outcome that I posted this picture in the coffee community group on facebook. After 5 Minutes the post had about 40 likes and 20 comments that people want to buy one or more. The response was overwhelming.
Another 10 minutes later I got a private message from the coffee company owner. He was quite impressed about my creation and we talked couple of minutes and waited for more comments from the community. After some time he said: “I order 100 of them”
For a moment I was shocked. After that, I was more than happy and proud to get such a opportunity. And based of the reactions of everyone I think there will be more merch I might be able to create for the coffee company. Thanks to my 10W diode laser from Endurance I’m able to come up with such simple but awesome stuff.
For me the story behind all this is, you should always work with materials and stuff which makes you happy and which you appreciate the most and others will do the same. Do what you love and not what you are forced to do.
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skype: george.fomitchev
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