Cermark result - my biggest print so far

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

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The little ULS took ages to do this, but I'm happy with the result.
The stainless steel (304) is 1.5mm thick, and folded, so no warping as we went along!
I'd tried on another scrap, the idea I'd read, of airbrusing Cermark on - a light coating only - and found it not as good as the thicker sloppy foam brushing on that I used.
The hard part about this was aligning it - the image itself occupies the entire 24" x 12" Universal bed space except for 3mm in each dimension.
The panel itself is about 1.25" wider all round, roughly, so after putting it down, you didn't quite know where the original boundaries of the bed were.

I vector engraved all outlines first, twice, then raster engraved the lot (100% power, 38% speed, 50 watt ULS)
IN the end I was not happy with the bigger outerline in the image, and the text saying the Head of Qld's greatest rail trail, which I'd done in a 60% grey, so I decided to put it back in, check alignment, edit the file for a 90% black, brush new Cermark over the outline and rerun the relevant parts.
I can tell I was about 0.1 mm off alignment, but I'm looking for it- otherwise, I'm very happy with the cermark-over-cermark, double application & double laser, and also happy with the blackness of the parts that are meant to be black.

I salvaged all the unused Cermark to use again, too - there was a fair bit that went onto this panel!

ULS laser engraving, not Chinese... rather slow, but worthwhile.
Preparing the photo took a while...

Thanks for advice & hints!

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

P.S. It gets mounted on a this huge Crow's Ash tree stump we've cleaned up.
(That'll happen tomorrow.) ;)

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[Mike Null]

Ian


That is indeed good work. I would have used the airbrush for an area that large but your result speaks for your method. I have, on very few occasions, applied Cermark twice and generally, was happy.

[Hannu Rinne]

Ian,

Really fine work !

Best regards,
Hannu

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

Looks fantastic! Would love to see a picture of the end result on the stump too! Great work by all involved.

[Tim Moy]

Wow really nice work! We struggle with large solid areas, usually get some sort of patterning and have to re-apply cermark and laser again.

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

Thanks for the compliments!
I wasn't happy with two lighter areas in the background pic, so I aligned it again, put a bit of cermark on, cropped the BMP, and relasered them darker. It's not 100% but is better than it was.
Finished pic mounted on stump below: (the log is about 4'4" long)

P.S. I welded four railway dogspikes to threaded rod, and drilled them right through, to serve two purposes- to hold the feet to the log, and to go diagonally through each buttress to prevent further splitting at the open ends.
The log has been drowned in several coats of linseed oil, and I'll do a beeswax/linseed mix soon.

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... and This was the log before we began:
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[Kev Williams]

very nice work :) -I like the shape, thought it was a camera lens thing at first, but nope, it's a shape thing! Cool log work too, I would have no patience for that! :D

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

Thanks - yes, camera angle distorts things too, especially when you are trying to get a decent pic of a reflective surface like this, but yes, also, the shape is distorted - made for a ton of extra thinking to design an appealing shape, and trim the log to match - and the ends of the stainless are at a different angle, because they slope back - than the angle the ends of the log make on the ground.

And the ton of extra thinking was also in making sure the Cermarked image fitted the 24 x 12 inch bed of the M-300 !
I didn't pick the wording - I just had to make what they wanted, look nice. (It's significantly different in layout from that they provided, but the words are the same!)

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

No doubt this took plenty of thought and time to accomplish this. Really spectacular results.