Knife Cleaning Instructions

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Duncan needed some more knife boxes for his lovely kitchen knives, this time he also requested that I engrave some care instructions onto the same material. The trouble with engraving is that it just doesn't show up very clearly on wood materials, the burn residue that collects in the engraving also wears off over time and the writing can fade. I made these three samplers to demonstrate the different possible techniques (and clearly should have arranged them left to right).

On the right is the standard engraving. Despite having a sensible amount of power applied to give some depth you can see that the text is barely legible.

The middle sampler is a standard font that is outlined with a low power cut. Low power cuts are great for line work, the burnt material is very black and is sits in a very fine channel on the material so it doesn't wear out over time (at least not so quickly). The trouble with a standard font is that the laser outlines both sides; imagine an 'l' would actually be cut as a small rectangle. This can lead to a bit of blurring and excessive burning.

Finally on the left is a 'hershey' font, a single line vector font that provides the best of both worlds. The low power lines give it a high contrast and the single line makes it very legible. I tend to use hershey fonts wherever I can because they also cut extremely quickly.




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