Besides cutting a basic 5.5" hole in a board for a template for a friend this was the first “big” project I finished using my new LongMill with LaserBeam. It was an ornament for my wife to bring to her horror themed ornament exchange. I have to give her credit, the idea was hers but I implemented the design and execution.
There was a lot of trial and error in getting the laser burning and spindle cuts to line up between VCarve and Lightburn. Note: Don’t forget to switch out of laser mode when switching over to cut with the spindle
In the end though I figured out my mistakes and got it to work. I tried engraving the text with a v-carve path using a 30 Degree V-bit but the Baltic birch kept chipping out and I lost a few of the finer details in the lettering. Decided in the end to laser engrave both the text and Freddy. There was a happy accident in the end that ended up adding to the design. I cut into a previous profile path on the wreath but it lined up perfectly with the loop for the ribbon in the end so I couldn’t complain. (Second picture below). Overall it was a great experience and I love this new LongMill. So glad I picked it up and I already have several friends asking me to make them one of these ornaments!
I tried some ornaments out of ply this year and pretty much failed misserably. After dealing with pine and several hard woods, I discovered that ply requires skills I don’t have, nor wish to master.
Good job on alligning the laser on the carve. I have struggled with that myself and have found after many many problematic tries that if you save an “on-line” profile toolpath as a .nc file in the Vectric software, you can import the file into lightburn, resize and have a template you can cross design your etchings on.
It’s amazing to have a tool that can pretty much handle any crazy idea that pops in your head and you did’t shy back at all with this ornament. Multiple parts with switching zero points. That must have been a brain sweat right there.
That Bob Ross lucky accident, is the universe patting you on the back.
Thanks Eddie, I can’t wait to make some hardwood projects myself, the ply is definitely finicky especially when trying to get fine details in it. I can see reserving its uses for making jigs and clamps but in the future I’d try hardwood for v-bit engraving.
As for getting the placement right between V-carve and Lightburn all I did was surround my V-carve vectors in a box the size of my material and then exported those vectors as a DXF and imported that layout into Lightburn. Then just positioned at same origin point of x0 y0 on my grid. Also, I found the offset from my laser and spindle is about 2.655" in the Y and 0 in the X. That got me pretty close within a few thou and was a good jumping off place to line the two up at the machine.
