On this episode of The Atlanta Maker we see what we can do with a dollar plate from Dollar Tree.

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The plate is too thick to fit on top of the honeycomb tray so I've removed it and got out the risers that I used in the hammer video. For this plate I needed three of the risers, and I centered the plate in the middle of the Glowforge upside down so that we can engrave on the bottom of the plate. We have a design that I put together using the Glowforge premium trial and created some text to engrave on this plate. Now, one thing we have to do, because the plate is upside down and we're engraving on the bottom to make it safer for food, we're going to have to mirror all of this text. It's really easy to do just by going over and using the flip horizontal button so that when this is read through the plate it'll read in the correct manner.

Now we need to determine our settings, and for glass I'm going to refer to the Glowforge setting document, which I believe came from the Glowforge user group (GUG) on Facebook. We're going to go with the setting here for glass of 850 speed, 100 power, and 340 lines per inch. They're saying we can do one or two passes on them. We're going to try one and see what it looks like. The first thing we got to figure out is what to use for a material thickness. So, let's go down to the Glowforge and we're going to use a neat little tool to help us determine that.

Now we need to determine the material thickness to enter in the GFUI, and we're going to do that with the machine off. We have the plate inside the machine, and we're going to grab the gantry here and move it over, and move the head over to it, being careful not to touch any of the mirrors or lenses. We're going to use this little tool, and I'll put a link to it out in the show notes. This is a tool that will help us quickly get the setting that we need. We are going to put it on our material until it's about to touch each of those little steps. Right now we're kind of between 0.375, and we're almost at 0.313. So, maybe we'll give a try about 0.35 or so. It's got a little bit of play in here between the 0.375, so let's go with 0.35 and put that into the application now.

Pick the uncertified material, and then we're going to put our 0.35 thickness in there. So now we have to enter those settings. Remember we're going to do 850 speed, 100 power, and 340 lines per inch. We're going to go to manual. We're going to go speed 850, power 100, lines per inch of 340.
Now I have all of the settings set up for each line of these and we can go and hit, Ready to Print, and let's see how long this is going to take. All right, it's going to take 12 minutes. Let's go down to the Glowforge.

Well, there you go. This turned out way better than I thought it would. Now, after I engraved it I took it upstairs and washed it with some soap and water just to make sure we didn't get any glass pieces all over there, but it turned out really nice. I think I'm going to play around with some more glass items and maybe even see if I can put some stuff around the edges of the plate.
Let me know what other kind of stuff you'd like to see, and if you like the video hit like. Subscribe if this is something you're interested in, thank you.

Link to the material thickness tool by eflyguy I used in this video: https://community.glowforge.com/t/pre...

Link to the risers I used in this video: https://community.glowforge.com/t/mat...

Link to the settings spreadsheet I used in this video: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

Timecodes
0:00 Intro
0:16 Glass Plate Setup
1:42 Glowforge Focus Height Tool
3:00 Glowforge Glass Settings
3:40 Glowforge Glass Plate Timelapse
3:58 Finished Project Example

#glowforge
#lasercutting
#laserengraving