on today's makers mashup we're etching glass frames with a diode laser
so on today's makers mashup we're going to be engraving these photo frames and we're going
to be engraving the glass on them now one of the things that we're going to be doing it with is a
diode laser and if you've had a diode laser for a while you know that you can't engrave or at least
you can't easily engrave things like glass or acrylic and i'm going to show you a technique
today that will allow you to engrave glass which means that you can get a photo frame
or a cup or anything else that you can get a good focus on and engrave it with your diode laser
now back when i had access to a co2 laser i loved being able to engrave glass i always thought it
was a really cool thing to do and with the diode laser i know a lot of people in the community
they say you can't do it because obviously the laser itself doesn't operate at a wavelength
that can hit the glass itself and actually engrave it and that is totally true however this technique
i'm going to show you today will allow you to add a frosting or that engraved look on the glass you
won't be able to do varying levels so that will rule out things like doing photos and pictures
however you will be able to add silhouettes and put a really nice look letters whatever you want
on photo frames and you can extend the same practice to glasses or whatever else that you
want that is made of glass and use this technique for that so today we're going to be covering the
process and how to do that and then after that i want to also i'll be adding to our weekly videos
we have a weekly poll that we're doing now in the youtube channel so if you're on youtube and you're
a subscriber you'll see a poll come up every week and at the end of today's video i'll be
going over the poll results so with all that said let's get to work so we start by setting up what
we want to engrave on top of our piece of glass what i'm going to do here is just add some text
once i have the text in place you just want to confirm your settings here
i'm going to be using this on fill mode so it's going to scan across each letter uh i have the
power set at 100 you want full power of your laser uh this is gonna vary depending on the
power of your laser of course with mine i set it at a hundred percent and i got solid results
every time uh the speed it does not have to go very slow you want to have a good speed to this
1000 millimeters a minute worked very well for me and now that we have the art that we're going to
be putting on our object let's go get everything else ready here i've already removed the pane of
glass and the first step here is to make sure that we have a clean surface so what i'm using is just
some acetone and we're just going to wipe down the surface and make sure that there is no residual
oils or anything else on the glass that we're going to be doing the engraving on
now we're going to take our clean pane of glass and we're going to put it into our paint booth
i've got it propped up on a small piece of metal and this really protects it from sticking to the
bottom of the paint booth and what we're putting into an airbrush here is some tempra paint and
water to thin that out so we get a nice even spray and then what we're going to do here is spray
everything and coat that glass completely with the airbrush now you might not have an airbrush i've
linked one down in the description that works well for me but if you don't have an air pressure you
can try painting it on i didn't do that because i wanted a nice even coat and when we dry it
here in a minute you'll see that it gets a very uniform coat that uniform coat i think helps make
sure that when the laser hits it and engraves this that it gives you a nice uniform engraving as well
once we have a good solid even coat then you're going to want to hit this with a heat gun i used
a heat gun but you could in fact just let this dry it's going to take a lot longer if you just
let this air dry the heat gun managed to make it so that way i can move on to the next step of this
process in just about two minutes and as you can see as this dries it changes to a lighter color
and that lighter color has absolutely no effect on the end result i did try multiple coats of tempera
paint on this and it all came out the same way now that we have our material ready we need to
focus our laser now i'm focusing the laser on top of a large piece of ceramic tile and i'm using one
of those metal business cards to get a fine point on my laser once this business card is removed the
laser focal point should roughly be right where the tempera paint will be when we put our piece
of glass on top of this ceramic tile this piece of ceramic tile i'm using like a waste board and what
i believe is happening here is that as the laser hits and makes contact with the tempera paint it's
heating up very high temperature and then because there's no air escape that's what causes the glass
to start melting is because we've got that high temperature laser hitting the tempera paint and
then additional heat being created because there's no air flow underneath the ceramic tile now that
we have everything all aligned we're just going to start our engraving process using light burn
now that we have our laser engraving complete we're going to take this to our sink and we're
just going to rinse it off the tempura paint is a water-soluble paint and also a non-toxic paint so
while there's some fumes that you'll notice when you pick this up off the laser most of those fumes
were contained between those two layers and when you wash this off all of the tempera paint just
washes off and leaves the engraved glass and i think the results here are absolutely spectacular
once you get the process down it's easy to repeat i took some stock photo here and applied it it's a
silhouette with chicago and applied a photo frame to it with a picture in the background of the bean
and then i also tried this with a disney castle as well they all came out absolutely spectacular
so as you can see this was really a simple process to put together uh we just airbrushed the tempera
paint on there and then i used a heat gun to dry it it puts a very consistent coat on there you
could probably brush it on as well and then just allow it to air dry if you didn't have those tools
but i really recommend the airbrush because it puts a very uniform coat on there and i didn't try
it with a brush or just letting it air dry if you try this out and you use a brush or you just allow
it to air dry let me know down in the comments how it works out for you i'd be very interested to
know that you get the same level of rather uniform frosting uh from using a brush versus an airbrush
and that might speed your process up overall the airbrush only took me a few minutes to get this
up and going but as you can see the results are rather spectacular and these are only a dollar
at the dollar store you can easily sell it for five dollars and more than double your money and
the time investment on these is extremely low maybe there's some initial investment
in some stock photos or silhouettes but you can produce those yourself with in photoshop
all you have to do is desaturate and high contrast and turn these into black and white
and then you can use even a regular photo to create the silhouette effect so as promised we are
now going to be having a weekly poll and i will give those results each week in the youtube video
and this week's poll results was really on metric it was a question because i've seen
youtube comments occasionally where people ask why we always use metric system versus the imperial
system being in the us here first i really enjoy the metric system it's much easier to use than the
imperial system but 3d printers and all of a lot of scientific community really uses the metric
system versus imperial so with that said i asked the poll of are you using the metric system on
your 3d printer and overwhelmingly we had 224 different responses to the poll and not one
of them said that i'm using imperial units and living in a country that's metric uh there was
a very very small two percent that said i have my printer set up to use the imperial system
versus metric so clearly metric is uh the way that 3d printers work which most of us already knew
that but the poll is interesting so definitely look out for the new poll this week in the channel
and i will definitely update you with the poll results of that poll in the next weekly video
so with that is going to bring the end of today's video if you like to make sure you mash that like
button and don't forget to share and subscribe so you don't miss any of the upcoming videos now
if you need help with this project or any other project feel free to check out our discord channel
it's a large makerspace where you can find all sorts of people including myself to help
you with the projects that you're working on and links for that are all in the description below
so with that i want to say thanks again for watching and we'll see you all next time
you