photo's on the Fiber, bounding box engraves-

[Kev Williams]

I've done a few photos on the fiber, but never realized until these that the thing is also engraving the bounding box--

My BIL who works for me has this tattooed on his arm (I fixed the bad spots ;) ) and he wants to engrave it on the blade of a knife he just bought.
However, as you can see, around the photo itself, the fiber 'polished' the stainless. Second pic is a couple of mishmash tests, one was done at much lower power, and one I made into a transparent gif photo and imported it, didn't matter, both of these tests also polished the SS...
358522358521

The problem is the knife blade has a 'tumbled' finish, and if the laser polishes the non engraved areas, then it's possible the 2 sides won't match. I guess we could simply polish side 2, but that could be a can of worms...

FWIW, it's not a cheap knife...

I'm assuming the laser scans the bounding box by default and etches the 'nothing' at zero power, of which there is no such thing on a fiber, or at least mine, even zero power fires at 1/2%...

So, this post is partly a warning to others, and partly a "does anyone know a way around this?" query... Like, maybe coating the blade with oil or something to prevent the low power beam from marking the metal...

[Gary Hair]

The solution would be to vectorize it instead of using a raster image.

[John Kleiber]

The solution would be to vectorize it instead of using a raster image.

True, but the quality of the graphic may be such that vector conversion will lead to a lot of cleanup.

There's a lot of shading in the image. It would take a total rework.

Looks like some sort of distortion in the chest area. I would focus on that initially. :P

[Lee DeRaud]

The problem is the knife blade has a 'tumbled' finish, and if the laser polishes the non engraved areas, then it's possible the 2 sides won't match. I guess we could simply polish side 2, but that could be a can of worms..."Tumbled finish", as in bead-blasted? Would a light pass of bead-blasting fix the polished areas or would it screw up the engraving?

[John Lifer]

Remove​ the background. It wouldn't take that long in Corel photopaint to mask and remove. Being it is a light background, you wouldn't have to be perfect.

[Kev Williams]

Lee, the blade is similar to this, just not quite as dark...
358560


Remove​ the background...
Already did that--
358558
One of the second tests I used the transparency on the left, the bounding box still engraved.

Last night I engraved an anodized flashlight, I wanted to run a 'shadow' pass first and engraved it at 1% power. After the second hatch was done, so was the flashlight! It engraved it just dandy at 1%. My power map sez 10% power is actually 15%, and zero% is actually 10%. I think the laser simply sweeps the bounding box regardless, and engraves white at zero, which is still enough power to engrave thru aluminum oxide. I suppose there's a good reason for this due to how a fiber fires?

Triumph included a video on engraving photos, and was very specific on setting certain TC and "Jump" numbers for doing photos-- I'll have to find that and punch in those numbers and see if it helps--

I could vectorize this easy enough but I'd lose about half the detail, but it may come to that... :)

[Scott Marquez]

Can you mask off the blade with tape? Then burn as many passes as needed to compensate for the tape in the desired areas.
Scott

[John Lifer]

Sorry kev, I imported a drawing the other day and engraved well, inverted and box engraved. Clean up in corel (inverted image) and it still was there in ez......I gave up as it was a test.