Rotary engraving in glas with diamond drill bit

[John Henriksen]

Hi Here is my first try , engraving a bottle with my rotary diamond drill bit.

It works first time, pouring few drops of water now and then

3 passes with a speed of 500 (full speed on the motor)

The connection bit hole to my motor is 3.1 , but my diamond drill is only 2.9 so is was a little shaky 

Using T2Laser from Zax everything works just fine 

[Zax]

Nice job, it's a lot harder than most people would imagine.

[ThothLoki]

Very nice!  I agree with Zax. It is harder than it looks. Don’t know how I would have done it without T2Laser

[John Henriksen]

Thanks for the comments
A wine bottle is not at plain smooth surface so I will se if I can trace the surface and adjust the z axes while the job is running

Have someone tried this ?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[John Henriksen]

Thinking about it
I total forgot to set the bottle size in my T2Laser setup

But it came out okay
Pure luck I think


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[ggallant571]

I have been laser etching wine glasses and currently do not have a z-axis. Limited to a relatively flat (vertical) region of the glass. Ready to add the z. Have stated on a software solution where I store various glass profiles and select at etch time. Would prefer a non-contact distance sensor and let the application do the figuring.

BTW - I suspect the laser is much more forgiving than a cutting tool. Do you do multiple passes?

[ThothLoki]

I played with glass most of last summer. Wine bottles are hard

You can see my attempts/failure/successes here http://benboxlaser.us/index.php/topic,2118.0.html

[John Henriksen]

I have been laser etching wine glasses and currently do not have a z-axis. Limited to a relatively flat (vertical) region of the glass. Ready to add the z. Have stated on a software solution where I store various glass profiles and select at etch time. Would prefer a non-contact distance sensor and let the application do the figuring.

BTW - I suspect the laser is much more forgiving than a cutting tool. Do you do multiple passes?

HI

Yes I do multiply passing , setting it to about 8 passes 3mm just to divide up, then when I think it looks okay I stop the cutting.
For this example it only had 3 passes.

I would all so like to make my ovn distance sensor so I can level out the curves there are in the bottle.

It could be nice if T2Laser could read a surface profile in x,y,z and do the math in that case we would be able to drill on every surfaces 

A surface profile scan would only require that it reads the z- distance censor in a x,y resolution by 1x1cm grid (maybe less 0,5x0,5cm grid)
 

[John Henriksen]

I played with glass most of last summer. Wine bottles are hard

You can see my attempts/failure/successes here http://benboxlaser.us/index.php/topic,2118.0.html

Nice, I may try out this with my 2500mv laser with a black card behind the glass

[ggallant571]

I suspect the glass etches only on the side that has the energy absorbing  material. Getting the proper type and thickness of paint has been frustrating.

[rolx]

Hello
Could you please tell me your whole setup ?
You had to buy the EleksMaker Mana 3 Axis Stepper Motor Controller Driver Board right ? And the Z axis kit with the spindle motor. Did you change your microstepping for bigger power in the stepper motors ?
Thanks for the info in advance.

[ggallant571]

Mine software and electronics are home brew. I use a STM32 processor board for g-code processing and as I am Linux based there is a dedicated host application.

The fixture consists of a rotary table with 3D printed wine glass chuck mechanism. Each chuck is spring loaded and only holds a specific diameter glass. The glass is held upside down in a vertical orientation with no support at the far end.

The rotary table is a conventional small milling machine fixture that I purchased from a friend for $25US. Could ask him for details if you are interested. I removed the hand crank and 3D printed a stepper motor mounting bracket and shaft coupling.

I use X for rotation, Y for up/down, and Z for distance from laser to glass. The X distance needs to be adjusted for glass diameter in software. I chose the host application. It could be in the firmware. If I understand correctly, T2 has this built in..

The laser affixes to a plate with 4 linear bearings that ride on two 8mm rods. Originally used 2 bearing but the action was not smooth. There is an 8mm lead screw and nut for Y axis motion.

The z-axis was never finished. Purchased some 100mm non-contact distance sensors that also sit idle. As I am currently only etching one glass shape there is little need to adjust the distance.

The frame is extruded aluminium rails with lots of right angle brackets. Because the rotary movement is very smooth and the Y is very occasional there is little vibration or warble.

The "standard" stepper motors with micro stepping of 16 are more that enough to drive everything. The laser is 2.5W. I recall it takes about 30 minutes to etch a pattern that is 160x30mm at 0.1mm resolution.

There are other designs posted on this site that use a existing laser fixture and mount the glass in a horizontal orientation. I started down that path but got bored with the 3D printing time!!! You also need to support the glass at both ends.

My #1 problem is getting the proper type and amount of paint on the glass.