Greetings all and happy weekending to you! I write with news!

Cameron dropped the floor in our much loved Diablo to connect our new WeCreat Vision 20 diode laser so for now, we have a laser within a laser until we get a cart for it. But hey, we are up and running with a laser that pops out of the box completely built!

Some of you may wonder why we needed (I use that word very loosely) a small, low power diode when we have so many capabilities with our giant CO 2 laser. The project below is one example of the techniques that a 100 watt laser just pulverizes because a 100 watt tube doesn’t really drop too far below 15 watts which is still too much power for some substrates. In addition, we bought an infrared head to permanently etch metal and even etch it in color. More to follow on that; we walk before we run!

This video was taken after Cameron did five or six material tests where we saw a lot of ghosting. He tweaked some of the settings but we aren’t completely dialed in yet and you’ll see that if you look really closely at the faint gray shading on the bottom half of the lion’s head in the finished product.

We don’t know why/what caused the difference in the etching because it was one continuous run. And while it’s certainly helpful that the diode laser uses Lightburn (the same software that drives the CO2 laser), WeCreat, the manufacturer of the diode, just launched Lightburn for their lasers in May of this year and they don’t yet have full feature integration so there are hopefully great software updates in the near future that will fill in the current blanks.

I bet a lot of you have used scratch paper at some point in your childhoods; this is that same paper. I can’t wait to get fully dialed in on it so we can do some really cool art with it.

Cameron took the week off and you know we are avid staycationers so we will be in maker paradise. I have a new art quilt I’ll be starting, I made a banana cake with cream cheese frosting today while Cameron blasted the porch with the hose to rid us of the pesky cobwebs and their tiny inhabitants; we can enjoy the coming reprieve from the heat dome out there on maker breaks. The fireflies are out en masse drifting to the orchestral cacophony of critters on the other side of the screens at night; that’s as close as I come to being outdoorsy. We look forward to an interesting week full of new things to learn, good food (we are making pizza!), and a leisurely pace.

More to come!

Dana