Mechanical Engraving vs Laser Engraving
Today the two most common forms of engraving are laser and mechanical.
Mechanical engraving has been around longer and is still used for many jobs. Some of the more common places you will see it used is in buildings for room numbers, names of rooms, diagrams of the layout of the building, trophies, plaques and on many other items.
There are 3 main ways mechanical engraving is done.
- Diamond Drag: Where you are just scratching the surface of your material with out rotating the bit. It does not go deep into the material but is readable and looks nice. This is done a lot on sports trophies, silver plates and very hard metals.
- Burnish Engraving: Where you are just taking off the top layer on the surface such as a coat of paint where the metal below shows threw or a lacquer coat where you can come back and oxidize the exposed metal to turn it black. You and get a bolder letter with this method.
- Deep Engraving: Where you engrave deep into the surface. This allows you to come back and fill it with paint if you want to make it stand out.
Laser Engraving although newer than mechanical has been widely used for about 30 years. As time goes by they are making more and more items engravable by laser now. You can get all of the colors of plastic sheet stock available for laser engraving that are available for mechanical engraving now and a lot of the sheet metals are available. Where most of the lower powered laser do not engrave into the metal it will change the color of the metal and can turn out a nice looking product with all the graphics available in the modern graphic packages. Lasers are also used for tumblers and glass items.
Laser Engraving unlike Mechanical Engraving only has one way of engraving but you can change the intensity, speed and distance of the laser to the product to get the desired effect.