How Laser Engraving can Bring New Life to an Old Spinner

The New Laser Engraver

If you didn’t already know Spinetic Spinners has had a fiber optic laser engraver for months now and we have been posting tons of awesome customizations on our social media. Today however we are going to break down the entire process of how we turned an old, used, and slightly damaged stainless steel spinner into a 1 of a kind piece of art.

The Process

I, Josh, personally love Damascus steel style patterns and since this is my personal unit, I decided to go with a pattern of that nature.

After setting up the design in the laser software, lining it up to make sure everything is centered and secured, and adding the correct settings for a deep stainless steel engraving, the actual process is started.

After we achieve a nice deep engraving, the next step is to set the laser to color the engraving. The engraving by default, leaves a matte style color however we want this design to pop.

Different settings can achieve different colors and there are even some types of lasers called, MOPA Laser Engravers, that can do the entire rainbow. We don’t have a ton of experience in getting other colors with our non-MOPA machine, so we will just stick with black to give the pattern a ton of contrast against the silvery stainless steel.

This process is much slower then the normal engraving part and thus if you want us to color an engraving we will normally charge an extra fee.

Now you may have noticed the areas we didn’t engrave are a brownish color. That’s just carbon left over that didn’t get pulled out our vent and a quick wash down with some soap/water and a quick wax will remove most of it.

That looks amazing! However some of the small details/lines still look a little dirty and will require a light sand in order to bring back the high points’ color. The more detailed a design and the more likely we will need to do this post engraving step.

The Results – They Speak for Themselves