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View Full Version : Disaster recovery and mirrors



Darren Null
11-06-2007, 7:38 PM
http://cambs.com/etch/radar1_s.jpg
It went horribly wrong. And I don't have enough cash to buy another mirror, so it HAD to go right. About the 128mm mark, the laser stopped writing the image and just started doing white noise, and it was 20mm in before I noticed. AAAARGH!. I stopped it. Made up another graphic that started where the laser began acting silly. It finished the rest of it with no problems, but there was a 20mm band which had been burned twice.

The customer wanted a date on it, so I wrote the date in the band before spraying the back black. Because the band had been lasered twice, the black didn't show up very well. So I lasered the date (and the tweedly bits either side to fill in the space) again and sprayed it gold. I confessed all to my client, and she said that she'd want it doing exactly the same if she wanted another one. It did look good, but doesn't show up on the photo well.

So. Just because things go wrong, doesn't mean it's a write-off.

Shane Turner
11-07-2007, 12:35 AM
Nice save Darren!

I'll have to remember that one for the next mirror I wreck :)

Craig Hogarth
11-07-2007, 1:10 AM
Darren, I've had that happen a couple times before. I just restart the same graphic but engrave bottom to top.

Darren Null
11-07-2007, 6:45 AM
I didn't think of bottom-up engraving. It would still have left me with the band though, so the solution would have been the same.

The image to be lasered was an etchtoned (andromeda photoshop plugin...I still like the results) photo, so I had it in photoshop already. It's simple to select a specific amount of an image in photoshop- just set the selection tool for 'specific size' and tell it how many mm you want.

My laser doesn't have that much memory. A 600x400mm image at 300dpi has to be sent in two chunks. This was 150dpi so should have gone in, but maybe it was too close to filling up the buffer. So sending it the reduced image was kinder to it and more likely to be successful...so my panicked logic ran.

It worked, anyway, and the customer was happy. *phew!*

Incidentally, you can't save glass by burning over it...your original mistake is still clearly visible, but looks like it's buried in ice. It's rather a nice effect if you do it deliberately, but you are essentially running 2 jobs on the same glass, so it may not be worth it economically.

Bill Cunningham
11-08-2007, 9:55 PM
Some times, you can get away with it.. (running a job twice) I did a 5x7 mirror for a couple last week. After running it and spraying the back black, I had a look at it, and it looked terrible, like it had bands, and poor definition. It's hard to tell until you paint it and see the contrast.. So, I figured I had nothing to lose so I reloaded the image (I had saved the entire setup in a .cdr file ).. I set the mirror back in the laser, against the rulers where it was on the first attempt, put the power at 100 and the speed at 20% and burned through the paint to the mirror again.. It seemed to be going ok, at least the paint was burning away.. When finished I took it back to my paint area, sprayed it, then left it alone until it dried.. I could hardly believe my eyes.. It was 'perfect' So yup, 'sometimes' you can take a chance and get away with it..All it needed was more power..