Today we were working a pair of glasses that are going to be a gift for a special someones’ wedding. After we measure the circumference of the wine glass we can get started in producing a design. The only program we used for these glasses was Corel Draw which really helps expand the realm of what is possible with the laser. This particular customer gave us free rein to design the engravings. The only stipulations were that the design have the letter “K” and the wedding date.
The banner shown above is what I came up with after a few horrible brainstorming ideas(Obviously NOT shown here). Essentially what I was trying to create was a banner to stretch across the face of the wine glasses.
A rule we live and die by here at Classic Doors is measure twice cut once. In the laser shop I take the same approach and modify it to my needs. Probably the most important step in the process is to run a test engraving before etching onto the actual glass. The image to the side shows just 1 of the ways that we use different kinds of resources to do our test engravings. In this case I took 12-inch medium track masking tape that’s about 4 millimeters thin to create a kind of “casing” on the wine glasses. What we’re testing at this step is a few simple things like : Is the engraving symmetrical across all sides of the glass ?, Is the image being engraved clearly ? , Is the engraving skipping in any areas?, Does it fit? etc… For this job it took only 2 test etchings to make sure the engraving was good for an actual print.
After the tape is removed we can reset the glass and print the etching. For this engraving we used the settings of 100% power and 8% speed so the etching is nice and bright white.
After a quick 15 minutes engraving our glasses are finished. Once the glass is removed from the machine we’ll go over it with a special sponge that will remove any fragments of glass that remained after etching. Next the glass will be thoroughly inspected for imperfections that might have occurred during engraving. If the glass passes the test then it’s a quick cleaning with a little Windex and out the door.
