Full-Color Laser Engraving

[Andy Joe]

Ok, i have the atomic art package. A couple of things. U do not get a license to sell in a certian area, nor are you restricted to where u sell. I didnt have to go to their shop to recive training, i got a cd, and internet site i could visit for training. I recived several continers of powder and ink, that where mixed together with denatured alcholo, which evaporates quikly living the dye/powder mixed, so you have to add alcholo to it alot. U thing the mixture out and spray it through a ventura air brush over the tile. I have a Kern 150hse table. The top of the table is open and covered in papper to keep a vacum. All i do to realign after washing is tape down a rail around two sides of the tile and but it up to rail each time i go to realign. I have had no problems with that so far. You can tell they are still working to develop the customer service side of the product but they have tried as hard as they can to help me with all questions. The main problem is it is not as simple as just loading a picture, seperating the pic to cmyk, and then running. Its alot like glazing and u need to change intensity of colors, figure out what order they should run in, and the ink itself is very picky when it comes to applying to to the tile. Once u figure out what settings to run each color at they basically stay the same. Once in a while i adjust up or down in power by 2 or so but ussally its just adjusting the pic itself. I have acomplished one pic so far that looks just like whats on the screen so it is dificult to acomplish, this could be from my lack of experince in the rasther world, or with airbrushes. Also the focal height seems to be an issue. I wasnt able to run with their recomended focal height and had to adjust it on my own. Also i run at full speed, meaning a 12x12 tile takes me about 10 mins each coat. White tiles work the best and keep the shine better, i still coat with a clear after lasering anyways. I have been discouraged i havent gotten better results yet, but it is a workable process that isnt as expensive as we were lead to belive at first. I havent even used a quarter of my product yet, and i have run probally 50 tiles so far trying to get processes right. Any questions or advice please comment

[George M. Perzel]

Hi Andy;
Thanks for the info on the process. Not to be rude, but why bother??
It will take an awful lot of facts and figures to convince me there is even a minor market for this product. How many of the 50 did you sell, for what price, and what was your time/material investment for one on average?
Thanks
Best regards;
George
LaserArts

[Brian Jones FL]

after reading this i'm puzzled why it's something anyone would want to patent. Thermark makes the colors, corel photo paint can generate the cmyk separations.. laser each separation with a different thermark color and away you go. Why's that patentable? CMYK printing has been around for a loooong time, same beast different ink.

I did some really fast goofing around with the concept and came up with something really reasonably close to the sample pics i've seen in this thread, wasn't that hard. The key was really just figuring out the exact amount of power necessary to essentially 'set' each layer and then blast them to melt all the colors at once with the final pass.

[John Barton]

I couldn't read the whole thread so maybe this has already been answered. Is this essentially what a color laser printer does on paper? Our laser printer uses four toner cartridges, cyan, yellow, magenta, and black. It's got to be doing something similar to this automagically thanks to the super engineers at HP.

A few years ago I came across a website that sold toner that you brushed onto the lasered image and essentially baked it in using the laser. Isn't this sort of the same thing?

If so then I can fully understand the need to practice like crazy to get the settings right for each machine, each substrate, each color, etc... I would go nuts trying to keep up with all the proper settings. I can barely remember the setting for leather and wood even with them taped to the computer. :-)

Sorry been gone a while.

John