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brian fithian
07-22-2014, 1:32 PM
Looking for some Gold and Silver plated 10mm tags to laser engrave for a customer. Does anyone have any experience with Laser Engraving these ??

Bert Kemp
07-22-2014, 6:14 PM
I'm pretty sure you can't really engrave gold or silver plat with a 40 w co2 laser, You can mark them with cermark most likely.

Dave Sheldrake
07-22-2014, 6:53 PM
Gold is intensely reflective....(born out by the fact many cheaper lasers use gold plated glass disks as mirrors) I don't know about Cermark but you sure don't want any back scatter off of anything gold :(

cheers

Dave

Dan Hintz
07-23-2014, 6:07 AM
Looking for some Gold and Silver plated 10mm tags to laser engrave for a customer. Does anyone have any experience with Laser Engraving these ??

I think you need to clarify what you're attempting to do, Brian, hence the lack of responses that get you where you're going. Are you trying to engrave gold/silver plastic (like RowMark/IPI type stuff), are you trying to simply mark metal tags, or are you wanting to actually engrave metal?

If it's the first, plenty of initial settings to play with can be found through search. If it's the second, Cermark is your only real option (though you'll have a really tough time getting it to work with true gold/silver, and if you expect it to last through the first jewelry cleaning, you're out of luck). If it's the last, you will need a fiber laser... (green would be "okay" on the silver, I believe, but the gold is best done with something even shorter in wavelength, like 350nm).

Nutshell, the first is doable on your CO2 laser, the second is iffy (at best), and the third is right out.