LowRider-inspired Foam Ripper

Well, the kids’ did good… brought me a $8 box of 4"x4" ceramic tiles from HD yesterday evening. Seems an incredible bargain to me… about 100 tiles (covers 12.5 sq.ft.) in the box.

This morning I removed four tiles and lightly spray-painted them with flat white paint…

After getting the photo ready, it took about an hour and twenty minutes to actually engrave the image. This was done with a 2.5W Eleksmaker diode laser on my miniFR machine, at 1200 mm/min and 85% power, using Lightburn, “Jarvis” dither, and 300 DPI…

Tile and image BEFORE removing the paint…

AFTER the paint is removed, the image is genuinely fused into the ceramic…

While not perfect, I’m quite pleased with my first full tile engraving. By far, the hardest part for me – knowing virtually nothing about photography – is processing the photo for brightness, contrast, gamma, “pop”/enhance, interval/DPI, etc… and generally getting it ready to be lasered. Lightburn has the tools to do most of this now… and is getting better every day. The rest of the Norton white ceramic tile process is a piece of cake.

– David

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