Engraving help on CQD mark 1 & Harkins knife blade

[Kasey Maxwell]

Hi guys, I have a customer that needs 2 knives engraved with a logo, one is a CQD Mark 1 and the other is a Harkins Triton, both say "Masters of defense" on them, I tried a logo on one of them but it came out faint, I gave it a second pass and it looked the same, it wiped right off with my fingers, I used 100s and about 70p, it looks like a bluing on it, I couldn't imagine using cermark on it since it's not bare metal, anyone have a trick or do I need to send this customer away :(.......photos below

Thanks
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[Dan Hintz]

Engrave to bare metal, then use Cermark... obviously a jig is necessary here.

[Mike Null]

Dan

Do you have a picture you could show us?

[matthew knott]

That sounds like a lot of hard work, why not find someone on hear that has a yag laser, send it to them, add a healthy margin and sit back and enjoy the money. We have made some seriously good money sub contracting work out to other companys, just a thought.

[Dan Hintz]

Dan

Do you have a picture you could show us?
Me? A picture of...?

[Ross Moshinsky]

You need to go a lot slower and with 100pwr. I'd also strongly suggest vector engraving rather than raster engraving. It works much better.

We've done plenty of Kershaw knives and it took us a while to figure it out but that's what works for us.

[Bruce Volden]

more power, lots less speed!! On my 35 watt TT I shoot for 85 power, 15 speed job done.

Bruce

[Kasey Maxwell]

so if I vector engrave do I simply convert the logo to hairline ?

[Ross Moshinsky]

It depends on what it looks like. Sometimes you need to offset the lines to make it look right. Other times it's good to go when you just convert everything to hairlines.

Take out a piece of scrap black steel/aluminum and see what it looks like. That's the only real way to make sure it's going to look good.

[Richard Rumancik]

I am not as confident that vector engraving the mark will be a good thing. It is not something that I would do myself for a small logo or small text. The quality will really depend on the accuracy of the motion control in your laser and how well it handles the corners and all the starts and stops. Power will vary at the endpoints of lines. If you want to experiment, I would suggest that before you try it on the knife, you test it on a piece of scrap material (eg stainless + Cermark.)

Converting a logo to vector is not always simple either, as line width and fills can vary. If the image is currently a bitmap, you would probably have to use an auto-trace algorithm to convert it to vector. (CorelTrace?) If it is in vector format now, with black fills, then you would have to convert to a bitmap first and then use a trace program to go back to vector. Again, I have my reservations about doing this.

My laser is very accurate when laying down raster dots but if I tried to draw a small logo or text I am sure the result would not be acceptable.

When Ferro says that Cermark only works on "bare" metal they are generally referring to metal that does not have any organic coatings (lacquer, paint etc.) What you have could be stainless with a bluing chemical applied. It is probably not plain steel with gun-bluing, as that is not normally used on knife blades. The bluing chemical might be oxidizing the surface - really hard to say what it is doing - but it is not an organic coating like lacquer. What I am saying is that it does not eliminate the possible use of Cermark. But you probably don't have any spare knives to experiment on. That is the big problem with trying to mark unknown metals, as often the customer won't be willing to give one up to test on.

I don't knoiw how sensitive Cermark is to the conductivity of a surface. If the blued knife surface is conductive, then it would probably act no differently than regular steel. If the bluing has made it non-conductive, then I can't predict what might happen.

Perhaps the knife manufacturer could tell you more about the material and plating. If it is stainless, there is a chance that Cermark could work. If it is chrome or nickel plated then you will have more difficulty with Cermark.

[Kasey Maxwell]

thank you, I got it to work, I was very tired when I 1st tried it so I must have been thinking of anodized, but these knives are armor coated :) I used much less speed and it worked perfectly !

Thanks again !

[Richard Rumancik]

Hi Kasey - glad to hear you got a mark but to help others - did you get it to work without Cermark? (I think that is what you did originally.) I haven't really been able to get a mark without Cermark - it will frost the metal a bit but no black. Did you raster the mark?

[Kasey Maxwell]

no, I never used cermark, I was asking if I should treat it as if it was cermark (slow speed and high power), I 1st treated it like anodized metal with high speed and lower power but that did nothing, then I just lowered the speed and raised the power like you would do with cermark and that worked great, the coating on these knives is like armor so lots of power, my worst fear was if I engraved it with the wrong settings and give it a faded of partial image........then I'd have to buy the knives ;) I didn't have any time to convert the lines although that would be something I'd like to try in the future, cermark isn't needed since its not bare metal.