so I like experimenting with new materials and I try them as often as I can just to see how they laser engrave and see what the potential for some custom project is and a recent experiment led me to this now I'm going to talk about this in the video but I'm not going to talk about how it's all put together I'm going to talk about that engraving underneath what material I used and how easy it was to create this thing and more importantly how cheap it was so let's get started hey it's Steve welcome back to the shop now I mentioned that I've tried all kinds of crazy materials some some are fairly common like ceramic tile or leather but a few of them I've tried are much less common uh I live close to the beach so so things like seash shells or stones are easy to get uh as well as Coran which is a which is a material used for countertops but I came across this material called scratch paper it's not new it's been around forever but it's the kind of stuff you give to Children uh as you can see from from the the packaging here it's it's targeted at at children who are age three plus so I fit in perfectly and I decided I would give this a shot to see how it how it would laser and in this video I'll show you some of the things I created I'll go through some of the settings as well and uh I'll show you what you can ultimately build with this so let's get going and we'll start with some layout and then some settings to get started here we'll do something simple which is really just an image that is essentially black and white and what I what I did was just grab a piece of sheet music from from a classical piece and this is the first page of it now it's basically black and white so anything you see here that's black will be engraved now the background of these of these scratch papers is black so we want to make sure our our musical notes get engraved and and become white I'll use the black and white version of this paper and that should come out with a with a nice crispy image we won't need to if we look at the settings so we're not going to invert the image you will want to do that quite often here but for this particular one we don't now as far as things like uh interval or resolution you want to go just slightly higher than then say the height of your beam so the height of the beam I'm using here on the S1 is about 0.1 mm so I'm going to go down to 09 and that ensures that we have just a little bit of overlap between lines so that we don't leave any black material in uh it's just an insurance policy to make sure that the image is crisp now as far as settings uh on the S1 I can go really fast here 25,000 mm a minute and uh the power now the power is an interesting thing you really need very very little power with this stuff uh I'm going to set it to 30 here I found with the with the paper that has the white background 30% power on the S1 is is very good but be prepared to run a material test this paper is really cheap and and you you won't really care if you if you waste a piece doing material tests so I found 30% you can probably go down to as low as 15% even uh and still get a reasonable image but run a material test with your laser and try it uh just to get the right setting now I'm actually going to dither this so I'm using Jarvis because this paper is essentially binary it's either black or it's white There's No Gray in between so we're going to have to dither to get any kind of of detail it won't really matter on a musical scale but uh but if I engrave an image which I'll show you in a in a bit uh I'll I'll have this already set up to use Jarvis so that's essentially it I'm just going to send this over to the laser I'll show it it engraving uh again it'll be fairly quick this page will take I don't know 10 minutes maybe to engrave on an S1 and I'll show you the output and then I'll show you some of the other outputs that I did and you can judge for yourself awesome this material is all right I won't belabor you with the entire job here in real time but I'll show you a bit at the beginning and a bit at the end just so you get a feel for how quickly it's going uh in between here I'm going I don't know I think it's 20 times normal speed so you can see it working uh now this is the white background paper so keep that in mind because the settings for the color are different and I'll show you that next but you can see how it turned out here and it's actually pretty fantastic now I will caution you to be careful when you touch this material try to keep your fingers off the black surface because it is designed to scratch off and if you do that prematurely then you'll ruin your image so you'll you'll have to do it again the good news is the material is cheap but you really don't want to have to wait another 15 minutes to make it all happen let's take a quick second now to talk about the the rainbow background it's kind of a splashy color instead of white when you engrave off the black and I went over to KD and I generated an AI image that supposed to be the London Skyline although there's no London I there so I'm not sure but I'll assume it is and then I stuck the the text under it now when I put this into light bur I ran a I ran a material test first and I noticed that the power setting requirement for the color background of this scratch paper was about half of what it is for the white background and you can see here the settings that I have are around 12% rather than than 25 or 30 like I had for the white background so keep that in mind and then I I ran the normal engrave again and you can see the output here just came out amazing again which uh is only because I I ran it with that reduced power I did a few more images to put this through its tests and I started with this line art image that I created in KD then I found a model T4 assembly diagram then just for fun I did a kind of a 60s retro let's party sign I I will point out that you can do actual photographs as well so I took this image of the same dog I used for Benchmark stripped the background away in KD and then brought it into lightburn now I had previously set the rendering type to Jarvis so I don't have to worry about that but I did have to invert the image here because the the colors will be kind of reversed and you'll know right away when you're doing it wrong everything will look like an x-ray so be prepared to to flip that invert bit when you're doing an engraving if you're doing a photograph especially now there were a couple more tips I wanted to talk about here and the first one is around cleaning if you have residue left over on the material you'll see after the engraving it might look a little dim I didn't have this problem but if you do see some dust remaining on the material after you engrave you can just take a microfiber cloth and just gently rub it across the material to get rid of that the microfiber will pick this right up that works really well and the other thing is if you want to finish this and protect it you can actually spray this paper with clear coat so here I've actually chosen some some gloss clear coat but you could use flat as well so you didn't really notice any difference and this is how I did the the patent sign where I put it under acrylic I glued it to the board first and then I did the engraving and and and finished it after with clear coat so really that simple I know this was a short video but hopefully you got some knowledge you can put away in your toolbox and bring out whenever you want to do something really special for someone with this scratch paper and uh hopefully you saw how easy it is if you got uh some value out of this video be sure to subscribe to the channel because I try to do this stuff all the time uh also hit the thumbs up if you like this video and and click the Bell as well just so you get notified of things going on in the channel I also do a live stream every week with two other YouTubers and it's just a fireside chat with a bunch of Q&A so if you have some questions that you want to you want to get answers to uh come and join that live stream and we'll try and answer as many of them as we can and you can certainly provide some input there as well and finally I'll put uh some affiliate links down below for the two types of paper that I used as well as those spacers and things that I used to create the patent plaque and with that I'll wind down and get out there and make your world and I'll see you next time