Hello all,


New member here, looking for some advice on lasers for engraving. I plan to do some wood engraving to make some custom gift crates, but I am really interested in engraving glass. I am very new to lasers, just started looking at them.


Today I pretty much etch one thing - maple syrup bottles. I am currently using acid etching cream to put relatively simple designs on our bottles; however, I do a thousand of these a year. It's labor intensive and the designs don't show up very well. My bottles are very thick pressed glass that do not have a perfectly flat surface. They curve at the edges and some of my patterns slip around the edge a little.


I recently spent quite a bit of time with Trotec, and they were kind enough to demonstrate their laser by etching some of my patterns on my bottles. See attached picture. The results are good, a little chippy if you look super closely, but perfectly acceptable. The bottles did not need to be de-scaled afterwards, just wiped off. They took around 2-3 minutes each.

20211012_1505412.jpg


I was all set to order the Speedy 300 (60 watt with a 29" x 17" bed to fit two rows of bottles at one time), but there was a huge miss on pricing. My budget tops out at $15K and they were significantly higher than that. It's just not practical for what is essentially a side gig for me, selling $11 bottles of maple syrup.


Trotec says the price difference is due to their having "servo motors that allow Trotec to engrave faster and more accurately than stepper motors used on other systems, and ceramic laser sources which are air cooled and RF fired vs glass laser sources which are are water cooled and are DC fired". They tell me that "ceramic produces a finer beam and pulse more rapidly which allows faster engraving with higher quality than a glass source."


Given what I am trying to do here, do I care about this? I do want sharp clean edges and I do need speed (I do large lots of bottles at a time), but this feels like maybe more than I need to etch a simple pattern on a glass bottle. I see Boss has a laser that seems similar (LS-1630) and it is a much better price point for me. Thoughts on this or any other machine?


Your advice and recommendations are greatly appreciated!


-Lisa
Laser etching
Wood baskets and glass bottles