Engraving through transfer tape

[Scott Shepherd]

I have a one piece, one shot piece here and I'm debating in my head how to deal with it. It's a piece with clear laquer on it, about 6 coats, nice and thick. However, there are depressions in the work, pits, as you will, that are characteristic of the piece. I need to colorfill this very complex looking pattern on it. However, if I just engrave it and color fill it, then the paint will go into the pits (which I can't have). I thought about using transfer tape while rastering it, but I tried that one time with plastic and it actually fused the tape into the plastic and ruined the work. I reran it a couple of times, each time, it just got worse.

I'm rastered through transfer tape on wood before with no problems, but since I only have one shot on this and no test pieces, or samples, I thought I'd ask here first.

Any thoughts?

[Joe Pelonio]

Transfer tape has a pretty low strength adhesive, and is stiff. That makes it great for most applications, but if you have pits and need it to conform to them then a 3mil polyester based sign vinyl is a lot better. It's available at sign supplies in clear. You could also do better with the shelf liner contact paper stuff, assuming it doesn't contain PVC, or even a lot of overlapping
rows of a good masking tape like 3M 2040. With that you may need to do a couple of passes becase of the overlap areas being thick. You might find wider masking tape at the paint store but that's usually the weaker blue variety.

[Scott Shepherd]

Thanks Joe, I ran a few tests and just bit the bullet and did it. I should have been clearer. I wanted to mask it because I didn't want the paint going into the pits where the engraving wasn't. If I could mask it, then burn through it, then fill through that, then I should be okay.

I put a piece of transfer tape on a piece of MDF and tried it out. It did what I thought, it burned away the paper and left the adhesive behind (which is what I didn't want). So, I just burned the image into the work, and then took tape and cut little pieces and covered all the pits so paint wouldn't go in them. I just filled it with color and I'm waiting for it to dry now.

Here's a photo of it before color filling- you can see the pits around it. Turned out I was worrying more than I needed to :) (Not my artwork- customer supplied)

[Dave Jones]

Are you using the medium tack paper transfer tape? The only time I've noticed it leaving adhesive behind is if the lasering is so light that it just makes it through the paper. If I do it strong enough to go into the wood, and the engraving is solid RGB black on the art (so it doesn't create a dot pattern) then it burns away the adhesive for me. If it's gray or has small dots (halftone or dither) then it does leave behind unburned paper or adhesive.

[Joe Pelonio]

I agree with Dave, if you engrave into the wood deep enough to paint fill there is not going to be any adhesive left. I have never had adhesive from transfer tape stick to anything in over 14 years using it.

What you did was to burn just through the top layer of paper and not through the adhesive. If you want the paint to be on the surface rather than 'fill" then you should vector cut the transfer tape on a scrap of material, weed, apply more tansfer tape over it, and transfer to the material to be painted for a stencil. Again though, polyester based vinyl is a lot better for that.

[Scott Shepherd]

I only engraved it into the clear coat, not down to the wood itself (as requested by the customer), so I couldn't crank up the power to vaporize the paper and glue. I think I'm using high-tack paper.

I've never had that problem on wood, but I do know I tried it on plastic once and it made one heck of a mess. Maybe I did something wrong there (I was rastering through it).

Power settings on this was about 20% and it seemed to go about .010"-.015" deep.