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Bob Keyes
11-19-2008, 5:23 PM
Dan,

Nice looking barrels.

In Corel, draw your circle to size. Place art work on the same page. Select art work. Shift>Select Circle. Push Ctrl E to center the elevation and Ctrl C to center horizontally.

Hope this helps.

Dan Moffett
11-19-2008, 6:30 PM
Dan,

Nice looking barrels.

In Corel, draw your circle to size. Place art work on the same page. Select art work. Shift>Select Circle. Push Ctrl E to center the elevation and Ctrl C to center horizontally.

Hope this helps.

Thanks.

I believe I have it centered in Corel. I select the art then hit p and it centers it to the page. I have the page set same size as the substrate.

Still a little off center on the final product.

Dan

Curt Stallings
11-19-2008, 6:41 PM
Check to see if the beam is hitting where it is should be. Draw a verticle line 1" out from 0", and a horizontal line 1" down from 0". Laser them and then measure. They should be right on.

Curt

Tim Bateson
11-19-2008, 7:31 PM
Dan, Also insure your print driver has the exact page size you've set in Corel. Any variance and you'll be off.

pete hagan
11-19-2008, 8:05 PM
Hey Dan,

I recently had the pleasure of engraving 20 barrel heads for an event in Bardstown (Bourbon Festival) and I really got great engraving on these nice hard white oak barrel heads. I'll get some photos posted soon but I was happy with the results. The heads were really heavy!

If you're ever in Lexington give me an advanced shout and we can compare notes. PS we now have a woodcraft store in town. Nice hardwood selections even though they are a bit pricey.

Pete

Richard Rumancik
11-19-2008, 9:21 PM
. . . I tried to center it on the plaque but as you can see it is a little off. I traced a vector circle with the laser pointer and it looked centered before ran the job. Any tricks to center art on a circle?

The laser pointer might appear to be following the circle well enough but it is hard to tell exactly. Also, it may not be 100% on-spot with the actual co2 laser beam.

Generally what I do is draw my workpiece on a spoilboard placed on my table. I often use 3/4" melamine particle board as I can get scrap pieces. It is flat, and the white surface shows the lasered scribe line well. You can use it for many setups before discarding it. You can clamp it to your table (or for one piece, just set it in place and hope.) Then plot the shape of your workpiece. Be sure to turn off that layer, position the workpiece on the spoilboard to the outline just plotted, and then do the final lasering. For production I screw down the spoilboard or clamp it down. You might want to draw a few concentric rings if all your parts aren't exactly the same size. Then center your part to the nearest ring.

In some cases I clamp my workpiece down to the spoilboard if I am doing multiple passes or something more complex. For rectangular production parts, I often screw down guides aligned to the scribe lines on the melamine to make loading faster.

You can spend a lot of time trying to get your red beam and/or co2 laser beam aligned with the rulers but I feel it is unnecessary. The method above works regardless of whether your machine is properly zeroed to the rules or not.