Help with drawing

[greg lindsey]

I need to engrave this logo on some rifle uppers (anodized alum) the problem is that the lines in the rifle are so thin that the laser is barely picking them up, changing to .5 pt makes them too thick and the drawing gets bunched together taking out the detail, Any suggestions.

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

Have you tried experimenting with .4, .3, .25 etc size lines?

[greg lindsey]

Yes, but it dosent pick up the lines as raster, Epilog tech says anything less than .5 will only vector. Guess I can try playing with the focus. just thought of that.

[Bill Overturf]

Select your line that is an outline click on arrange from the top menu bar. Second line up from the bottom is convert outline to object. Then you can adjust as needed but it will raster it instead of vector cutting it

[Gary Hair]

I would vector the thin lines and raster the thick one.

Gary

[Joe Hillmann]

On Universals you can make a hairline rastor by selecting raster for that color in the print menu rather than rastor/vector. Maybe the epilog allows something similar. Although is there a reason you don't just vector the thin lines? Thin lines come out much more accurately when they are vectored rather than rastored.

[Martin Boekers]

Try converting to a bitmap (at hi res) you may have to run at 1200 dpi

[Jacob Peacock]

I took a stab at lasering with your artwork on some scrap aluminum I had. I first tried setting the PPI to max (1000) hoping that it would show a bit more detail but the detail was still lost. Next I tried to vector cut your artwork by making the whole thing a red hairline. I didn't see much of an improvement when I did this so next I tried grey scaling the artwork. I set it to about 70% grey and this made the details come out a little bit but everything looked sort of dashed and spotty and not very professional at all so that was out. As a last ditch effort, I sent just the tiny details to the laser to see what it would do with them and they just sort of looked like blobs.

The smallest mark I can get with my 2.0 lens was a .01" mark which is just too big to show off your detail. If you have a HPDFO (high power density focus optics) lens, this might be something worth trying as it will have a smaller tighter focal point and this should allow you to get your detail in. They are unfortunately expensive if you don't happen to have one.

[Gary Hair]

The smallest mark I can get with my 2.0 lens was a .01" mark which is just too big to show off your detail.

That seems awfully big, my GCC spot size is about .005 on my 2" lens, that's the width of a lower case "L" in Arial at 4.25 points, .01 is the same letter at 8.5 points.

Gary

[Scott Shepherd]

I'd redraw it with the guns as hairlines, single hairlines, and I'd vector the guns and engrave the star, probably along the same lines as what Gary said.

Your 2.0 lens should give you a .005" spot size. If it's not, you should calibrate your focus.