Elegant bookmarks are the need of any avid reader. The bibliophiles long for beautiful bookmarks while they have to pause in between reading their favourite book. People use several things like a piece of paper, market cards, or even fold the corner of the page. Yet, it seems boring, right. Let’s learn how the bookmark makers make their unique bookmarks with the laser engraver.
Create a design for your laser engraved bookmark
The foremost step calls for your creativity and personality to gather together to make an artistic piece. Next, pen down the creative ideas from your mind that picture the bookmarks you need.
Choose the suitable material for your bookmarks
The next step requires the selection of suitable material for making the bookmarks. The laser-engraved bookmark maker usually uses wood, leather, and metal for their bookmarks or anything that is thick and needs cutting.
Buying machinery for laser cutting or digital laser engraving
The thick bookmark material needs laser cutting to shape it according to your requirements. Generally, the bookmark makers prefer Trotec Speedy 300 laser engraver coupled with the Mutoh ValueJetUF UV printer for making bookmarks.
Although a laser engraver is a great helper for unique engraving bookmarks, different bookmark materials may require the use of different types of laser engravers. Let’s look at what popular materials are used for custom bookmarks.
There are common bookmark materials on the market, including wood, metal, plastic, plants, and ceramics.
- Metal bookmarks are made of pure copper and zinc alloy picks, more suitable for fiber laser engravers.
- Wood bookmarks are made of thin sheets of wood, more suitable for CO2 laser engravers.
- Ceramic bookmarks are made of thin sheets of celadon, white porcelain, and ceramics, more suitable for UV laser engravers.
- Plastic bookmarks are made of polyethene, more suitable for UV laser engravers.
Although there are a variety of materials that can be used for bookmarks, considering the cost of engraving and selling factor, custom bookmark makers often engrave beautiful wooden bookmarks with the CO2 laser engraver.
To engrave a unique wooden bookmark, it should not only set the laser parameters well but also consider how to choose printing pictures and processing skills. Let’s look at some engraving wooden bookmark steps.
Wooden Bookmark Engraving Steps:
Before wooden engraving bookmarks, we must evaluate whether the selected pictures are suitable for laser engraving. Not all printing pictures will show perfect results after being made by the laser engraver. For example, For plywood with prominent texture and uneven surface color, in order to improve the contrast and three-dimensional visual. Before engraving, it is necessary to convert the picture into a sketch. On the other hand, the sketch looks more concise than the black and white picture, which can improve our engraving efficiency. So, we can evaluate printing patterns through the sketch image method.
Image processing
- Open MeituPic and import the picture.
- Adjust the contrast of the picture.
- Click the Art button to turn the picture into a sketch
- Adjust the sharpness, strengthen the outline of the line, and save.
Laser engraving parameter setting
Due to different laser power, there may be different parameter settings. We only use an 80w laser engraver as a reference demo. If you use other laser power, you should adjust the two parameters of power and speed based on the actual laser tube wattage.
After selecting the picture to be engraved, we can set the below parameters by the control software.
1)Power: 8
2)Speed :500mm/s
3)Choose blowing to protect the lens better
4) The engraving interval is set to 0.08mm
5)Click on BMP, set the resolution is 1500, and the frequency is 70
After setting the above parameters, we can click the start button, and then the laser engraver can engrave beautiful patterns on the bookmarks automatically.
Conclusion:
Bookmark makers create their unique bookmarks by employing different techniques. The used material also affects the quality and appearance of the bookmark. You can use wood, metal, colored paper, clear synthetic paper, or white synthetic paper for making the bookmarks with your favourite carved print as per your preferences.
In actual application, we should adjust the engraving parameters such as power, speed, and interval based on essential requirements. Therefore, we need more practice to create more beautiful bookmarks.