Laser Engraved Pendants

I haven't shown much of it yet, but lately I've been working a lot with my new Glowforge laser cutter/engraver. I started out making rune sets, mostly. Then I realized I could make even more money from the same amount of wood and nearly the same amount of effort by taking the same rune template and replacing the individual runes with different images and symbols, stringing them on a necklace and selling them individually. At $6 a necklace (which I think is a pretty decent deal) I can make $150 from the same 25 chits of sapele wood that would make one rune set, which would normally sell for about $30.

The difference in profit more than makes up for the added materials (satin cord, jump ring and accent bead) and the added labor of stringing them together.

Polymer Clay Inlaid Runes v1.0

I've been making rune sets with my new laser cutter/engraver. Most of them have turned out pretty good, but there has been a learning curve.

 I wanted to experiment a little bit with using some material to inlay the runes. The laser can cut the runes nice and deep, and it just seemed natural to fill that groove with something, like epoxy or polyurethane resin, or polymer clay; something that would sand smooth and make for a good inlay.

My first attempt was using brass powder mixed with polyurethane resin. This didn't work out so well. My ratio of powdered metal to resin was way off, and it didn't fill the runes as smoothly as I had hoped. It did work, but there were a few air bubbles, and it just looked like an ugly color of resin, not like brass inlay, which is what I wanted. Sorry, no pictures of this first experiment.

My second attempt was to try polymer clay (sculpey). This worked a little better, on the inlay part at least, but there were still a lot of logistical issues that made this experiment more or less a failure.

One of the harder things to get perfect with this laser cutter is registration. There is a lot of parallax distortion in the central camera.  This makes it hard to line things up, like centering a rune symbol on the cut out piece of wood. The farther away from the center of the camera's field of view, the worse the error becomes. This has become a large part of the difficulty I have had with making these runes.

Because it is easier to sand and finish a plank of wood than it is to sand and finish 25 little pieces of wood, it is logical that I try to cut the runes into the plank, and then do the inlay before cutting them out. But this runs into the parallax problem. If I cut them at the same time I engrave them, the processes are relative to each other, and so they will come out fine. But if I try to engrave them, and then put them back in to cut them out later, they will never line up right again. It seems like they should, but they won't.

Anyways... I re-sawed an oak 2x4, that a friend gave me, into planks. One was about 3/16" thick and two more were about 3/8" thick. I laid out the runes in Inkskape and engraved them with my Glowforge laser cutter. I didn't cut the pieces out, as I normally would. I just engraved the runes and left them a solid plank. Then I sat down and started filling the runes with ploymer clay.

I made sure to fill the engravings completely, and let the clay mound up a bit. Then I baked it according to the instructions on the package. Then I sanded the tops smooth, getting rid of all the mounded up clay and revealing the shape of the rune.

I had watched a few videos on this technique, and they all suggested treating the clay with CA glue after it is baked and sanded. This helps to harden the clay, and it fills in any tiny cracks or gaps between the wood and the clay. Then, of course, it has to be sanded flat again.

I figured it would be easier to apply finish while the board was whole rather than to apply it to 25 little pieces, so I gave the plank a couple coats of tung oil. This turned out to not really be as good of an idea as it first appeared. Pretty pointless really, as this finish will end up being ruined/sanded off in future steps.

OK, so here comes the tricky part. In a perfect world I could just put the planks back into the laser, apply the same settings as when I engraved the runes, everything would line up perfectly, and now I could just cut the outlines to separate the pieces, right? Right. Never going to happen. I played with the settings for about 10 minutes trying to dial them in as close as I could get them, so that the image on screen overlaid the runes already engraved on the wood. Could not get them to match up for the life of me. Mind you, this is the same file that was used to engrave them in the first place. Nothing has changed. Still, I could not get them to line up perfectly. And this is on the thicker planks that stayed nice and flat. The thinner plank curled up like a potato chip when it got baked.

So I got them as close as I could, and decided to just score the outline and use that as a guide and cut them out on the band saw. The thicker planks would have been a bit hard to cut through on the laser anyway. It has limits.

 The score lines were OK on some of the runes, and way off on others. No good. I couldn't even use them as guides. I ended up sanding them off. Then I tried another idea. I would use the file to cut out a template on card stock. I could then trace around where the cuts should be with a pencil after lining up the template manually.

 This... sort of worked. Not really. The template wasn't perfectly spaced either (though I can think of no logical reason why it wouldn't be). And tracing around the holes was very difficult because the gaps between them were extremely thin. So I tried another trick that has served me well in the past, spray paint. A light dusting of spray paint over the template would give me a good visual guide to follow on the band saw.The results were, well... less than I had hoped for.

 The paint didn't give me very crisp lines, so on the last plank, I decided to just grid off the runes with a ruler and a pencil. It could hardly be worse than what I was already dealing with.

I cut out all the pieces on the band saw, and cleaned them up and rounded over the corners on the disk sander. I also had to sand off the spray paint, which made the tung oil I had put on basically worthless.  The spacing was abysmal. About 1/3 of the runes are not centered. The sizes of the chits are inconsistent, as are the shape. Overall, I give them a grade of D for quality. Total crap. But I have too much time invested in them to just throw them away (which is what I want to do), so I'll probably sell them super cheap just to recoup some of the sunk labor costs. I slathered them in lemon oil (old english) and called them done.

Total crap.

Runes, runes, runes.

Runes are another form of divination, which draws its roots from ancient Norse tradition. The runes have a long and interesting history, so if you are interested in divination, or Norse mythology, or history, or if you just have some time to kill, I recommend you do some reading on them.

I've made several sets of runes in the past, but never documented them. My recent interest in wood turning has introduced me to more exotic wood than I had ever previously worked with, and thought that they wood make for some lovely run sets.

 Above is a set made from black walnut. Below, is a set made from cedar.

 I also made sets from purple heart, genuine mahogany, and some random hardwood chits I got from the craft store. These are not glamour shots by any stretch of the imagination. They are just pics I snapped as an afterthought while I was making them.

Here is a little better picture of them in the case at the store, alongside some stone rune sets that are commercially produced.

And speaking of stone rune sets, I also made a couple of sets from river rock. I made several river rock sets, with different colored inking, but aside from the color of the symbol, they look pretty much the same, so just the one pic should suffice.

 All of the above runes were engraved with a dremel tool, and then inked. The stone sets were inked with acrylic paint. The wood sets were inked with a sharpie marker (except the cedar set, which I did not ink) and then finished with three coats of tung oil.

But one of my favorite sets was neither engraved nor inked.  They are printed.
I have a set of tarot cards that I sell at the store, which has the meanings of the cards printed right on the face, so beginners can learn them without having to look them up in a book every time. So I thought, why not do that with runes too?

So, some years ago, I did a layout on the computer with all of the runes, their names, their translation, and their divinitory meanings. I sized them to fit onto wooden chits (about 2 inches square) that I found at the craft store. The chits were stained black with wood stain. The runes were printed out on a laser printer and stained brown with coffee/tea to give them an aged appearance. Then I used a water tearing technique to separate the runes and give them a deckled edge.

Then I glued the paper to the wooden tile and gave both sides two coats of semi-gloss oil based polyurethane.

This is the same effect that I used for my pendulum boards, and that I will use on my some-day-to-be ouija board (though not the Ouija board previously featured). If you attempt to replicate this finish, it is important to note that you must use oil based polyurethane. The water based polycrylic will not soak into and darken the paper, giving it an aged and warm hue. Instead it will make the surface look plastic and cheap.
I don't know if I am the first person to make beginner runes like these, but I have never seen them anywhere. I'm rather proud of them, and think they would make a great tool for learning the runes.

As I progress with my wood turning and wood working, I now have more exotic woods to choose from, so I'll almost certainly be making more wooden rune sets in the near future.
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