I was thinking about trying to make some stamps with the laser cutter as a quick project. Presumably you would get a simple b/w image, mirror it and invert it so white was back etc, so that the black areas would be cut out.
Has anybody tried this sort of thing already? Any tips?
Hi Orion
Yes I actually did make some rubber stamps for inking some labels. The process is quite straight forward, and in fact you don’t really need to do anything image-wise as the laser software can do the inverting, mirroring etc. for you.
I bought some laserable rubber material, such as this from Amazon.
I believe others from the space have done block printing, using solid materials.
I’ll have to check my notes for the settings I used for the rubber material, but dialing it in wasn’t too tricky.
Kitronic has some laserable stamp material here as well.
I did make a couple of blocks using standard laser ply, I was quite pleased with the results. Though they probably wouldn’t pass muster for a pro. I think I stored the materials in one of the plastic yellow draws under the 3D printer bench, if you want to take a look.
You might want to check out some dithering/halftoning algorithms, some info here.
I made some stamps last night using the kitronic grey 2.3mm and it worked well.
I found this guide to be useful:
I was wondering, can anyone tell me which vector file formats can be read by the laser cutter software? Thus far I’ve only had success loading a bitmap and manually clicking through the cuts with a polyline.
Hi @Orion_Dooley, the laser cutter software quite likes DXF files. You can convert vector graphics files to DXF format with a number of programs. I tend to use SVG format along with InkScape as it’s free.
InkScape will also convert appropriate bitmaps into vector representations, which can save time when laser cutting line art.