MSRaynsford

A friend asked me to personalise a hammer as a gift for her father, text is pretty straight forward so it only took 10 minutes to line this up and engrave down the edges. Apparently these are going for £35 each in some places. I'm sure there are a million tools that could be customised like this which starts to sound like a business idea to me. I used magnets on the bed to keep the hammer from rocking over but if I were doing a dozen of these it would be really easy to laser cut a jig to hold the hammer in place.

3 different coloured flags for Vale, these are all engraved onto died leather, the wold was outlined to make it stand clear from the background engraving. One piece of leather is white on one side and brown on the other, I had the power set a little bit high while engraving the white flag and the marks showed through to the reverse, when the next flag was cut on brown there was no evidence of burning on the reverse, a clear sign that different colours absorb the laser light differently.

Engraving can be tediously slow, especially when you want to do the edge of a large area but not fill in the middle. It's something I covered before when I carved the cupboard door shields . I previously drew a dozen different lines to simulate the engraving effect, it was faster than the engrave but still a little bit slow. This time I thought I would try defocusing the laser beam to get a nice wide engrave, then the groove can be cut in a single pass which would be a lot faster.  I ran these test pieces at differing heights under the laser (the mm distance is height below the focal point. The results were quite effective and with a bit of tweaking it will do the job nicely. The first thing to note is that the corners cut a lot deeper than the straight sections. This is a known issue and Lasercut specifically has a setting for it. I found that reducing the corner power to around half of the main power solved most of these issues.  The other issue is the start

Some LARP groups have fancy symbols, others have very simple ones. These 3 diamonds are about as simple as they come but I'm sure they'll be very effective on the front of a shield. Here are some pictures of other laser cut bits once they've been painted and latexed and turned into proper weapons/shields.

Another take on the standard gaming ruler, this one has lots of aspects for measurement all crammed into the same piece.

Another phoenix design, this one is is far more detailed around the tail so I'm surprised it came out ok. The laser seems to be coping really well on these intricate foam designs and I'm not even using the vacuum bed .