Laser-engraving my MacBook
Those of you who follow my Flickr feed will have seen a couple of photos of my Black Macbook (affectionally known as BlackBook the Second), as it’s going through the process of getting the Photocritic.org URL engraved on the back – WITH LASERS! Obviously, everything to do with lasers has to be in all caps. Those are the rules.
Sadly, it seems as if something Bad Happened when I had my laptop engraved – luckily, the technician who did it has a solution: Why not colour it in with a Sharpie?
Back story
I’ve had my BlackBook for quite a while now, and I was considering replacing it in favour of one of those rather tasty-tastic new 13" Macbook Pro computers… One of my friends recently bought one, and my credit card has been sizzling in my pocket ever since. On the other hand, my current BlackBook is still relatively current, and it’s been upgraded to the max (I don’t remember what it started its life as, but it’s now a 2.0Ghz/4GB RAM/250GB HDD monster, which is perfectly adequate for most task, and still has reasonable battery life). So instead of plunging £1300 on the 13-inch MacBook Pro I’m lusting after, I decided to keep the BlackBook for another few months – or at least until the Apple Care runs out in March 2010.
To celebrate potentially saving £1300, I decided to spend £100 on getting the BlackBook laser engraved, because, well, lasers are reason enough in themselves.
I did a bit of Googling, and settled on using RazorLab; For one thing, if it’s good enough for Apple, it’s good enough for me, but also, they were among the first to get back in touch with me with a coherent response, and they’re based only a 10-minute motorbike ride from my house.
I drafted in a good friend of mine to try and help me design the logo; and while his design was absolutely wicked, it was a little bit too complicated. Instead, I ended up getting a vector graphic off istockphoto, and using that as the basis of my design.
At Razorlab
So, I booked my appointment, and went to see the lovely Soner who runs RazorLAB – he’s a true inspiration of a man; some of his product designs that were kicking around his office were positively brilliant. He took a look at my mock-up design, and discarded it out of hand; turns out that the machine can only handle vector graphics – luckily, I had also sent him the font I use on the logo and the vector, so we re-created it on his computer.
Then, a whole lot of precise measuring, placing the laptop inside what is, essentially, a fancy laser-printer (literally! It even uses printer drivers, which really amused me for some geeky reason) which can burn through all sorts of material. Thankfully, the engraving on the laptop was done at 30% power; I didn’t fancy having ‘photocritic.org’ permanently etched into my motherboard either.
About 45 minutes, a lot of interesting discussions about lasers, product design, Life as a Laser Etcher and £95 later, I was back on the street outside of RazorLab, with a freshly engraved MacBook and a renewed spring in my step.
The results
When we were doing the etching, Soner did warn me that engraving large surfaces could cause some streaking; he also showed me an aluminium casing which had some slight streaking on it – not so much that I would be worried about it; it still looked pretty awesome. On my laptop, there was some white on some of the engraving, which Soner said was dust – so when I got home, I tried to clean it off, but to my surprise, it was going nowhere – whereas half of the laptop is very subtle (in fact, it looked bloody awesome – you can tell something is engraved on there, but you have to look quite closely to see what is engraved; it looks brilliant), the other half is streaked and milky white.
I tried cleaning it a couple of times, but the streakyness continued – so I e-mailed Soner to find out what I should do. Not much, as it happens: He said that “The problem with engraving big areas is that as the laser head moves away from the origin point (in this case top-left), the engraving results in different streak patterns -because of acceleration and speed changes at far corners”. It seems as if the problems are quite rare, too: “so far, we did not have any complaints with regards to this issue as people usually treat this as part of the process -it is within laser engraving’s nature to do these kind of effects.”
Of course, I knew I was going to be writing this review, so I tried to find out if there was any way to solve the issue – To be honest, and as I told Soner, I don’t mind the streak patterns, I actually think they are sort of cool, the issue is that they aren’t really even across the whole back of the laptop – the other thing that confuses me is that when you do a quick search on Flickr for ‘blackbook laser engraving’, you’ll see that there’s loads of people who have quite elaborate engravings on the back of their laptops – both with big areas and smaller areas – and while streaking is evident in some of the photos, it’s never uneven from one side of the laptop to the other; also most blackbooks seem to go a bright white when they are engraved (see this one, this one, this one, this one and this one, just to get a feel for it).
I spoke to Soner about trying to find a solution, and he said that while it would be possible, in theory, to re-do the engraving; in practice it’s impossible to line-up the laser with the previous engraving, so there wasn’t much that could be done.
What to do, then? “The only suggestion I could give is to paint the white areas with a permanent black marker. That should help to get rid of the gray gradient.”
So there we have it, I guess – As high tech as laser engraving is, if something goes wrong, the only thing you can do, it seems, is to break out your Sharpie.
Needless to say, I’m not particularly happy with the final outcome of the laser engraving, but as you can see from the Flickr links posted above, it’s possible to get gorgeous results. If anyone know what went wrong here, feel free to post a comment below – in the meantime, I’d probably recommend thinking twice about getting your expensive equipment laser engraved.
Photos!
For the photo gallery, check out these here pics on Flickr; or keep on scrollin’:
The original design I came up with, before we had to re-create it as a vector
The design is ready!
Soner preparing the LASER
Results close-up
Results close-up: the URL
The back of the laptop
I completely love the subtlety of the left-hand side of the laptop – just such a shame about the white streaky mess on the right-hand side of the lappy, where the logo is :(
Looks pretty good when I’m working in a cafe – shame the logo is a bit lower than I had hoped (it is not really visible when the laptop is standing on a table – I’d hoped it was about 2 cm higher)
Featured on the Consumerist!
Seems as if one of my favourite publications – The Consumerist picked up on this story and did a short feature on it – which in turn attracted some good advice from Shane (see comment #2, below). Thanks for your help everyone!
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Insights, suggestions and comments
That is so cool!!
My aluminum Macbook and I, are very jealous right now :)
This is BS. I’ve operated a laser engraving business for the last two years, and can tell you exactly what happened.
The beam has less area to travel in one corner than the other, hence you will get a slightly more powerful beam and deeper engraving on one side than the other. BUT – it is usually so slight that you would never, ever notice. I’ve done full 24×18 pieces that show no difference at all. The only time I have heard of an engraving showing that much difference is when the tube is going out.
Laser engraving is all about guessing. You have a speed setting and a power setting. To get a good engraving, you need to take into account the material you are engraving on, the speed of the head, and the power of the beam. When you match everything up with the correct settings, you get a successful engrave.
Here is my best guess on what happened. He has too low of a power setting (or he’s running it too fast), so you werent getting a deep enough engraving to totally engrave off the anodizing. That is why you get that quasi-engraved look in the one corner. Second issue – I’d bet his laser tube is going bad, hence there is a noticeable difference in power that opposite corner. This could also be the contributing factor in why the rest of the engraving didnt go deep enough.
LASTLY -
If you are very, very careful and have a very, very good attention to detail, he can successfully line it back up for a second engraving. This should resolve the not-deep-enough issue, and get you a consistent white engraving across the entire design. If he would like some tips on how to do that, have him email me.
You mention the origin being at the bottom left corner. Perhaps the laser can only move in one direction away from the origin, but if it could move left and right from the origin then setting the origin at the middle bottom of the laptop you would have had the white parts happening at both edges (like inverse of vignette) and only half as badly.
This sort of approach may be part of the reason why other people seem to have not had problems, perhaps sonne’s system isn’t set up for large areas, but other systems are, maybe even with lasers that can shift to do multiple origins? Just guessing here…
We used to have this problem all the time w/ our laser cutter. The problem is that the platform that your laptop was resting on was not perfectly level, (or else the arms that the lens moves on were not level.) Since it wasn’t level, part of the laptop was closer to the lens than other parts, which meant that in some areas the laser spot was in focus and in the other areas the spot was out of focus.
In some cases you actually want the spot to be out of focus since it gives a slightly blurrier engraving (which can be useful on materials that are melting rather than ablating.) But having it be non-uniform is a real killer.
If you’re feeling super crazy brave you could try using a mild solvent to smooth out the grooves, but really, that’s just crazy!
Hey!
I noticed you linked to my engraving :) I was commenting on the consumerist post about this and then noticed my flickr stats jump up for some reason…now I know why!
Anyway, it must be said after the first pass, half of my design pretty invisible. The guys that did it didn’t move the macbook and basically just went back and did a second pass over that half. They would have done more to fix the one thin line that sort of got messed up, but it might have affected the rest so it stayed. Not sure what happened in your case (I’m no expert at this) but I’m sorry to hear about it :( I sort of dig the results but I guess it would have been better without the streaking.
Have you considered getting the case replaced and redone? The black macbook isn’t that new, but if you’re planning on using it a lot it’s a consideration..
Lastly, once you engrave, you can’t live without it. I just ordered a new MBP for myself and I’m already asking around for quotes for engraving that ;)
100% in agreement with Shane on this. I have 1.5 years experience running an Epilogue laser engraver. there are settings, Speed and power, that are used with a variety of Substrates. A second maybe even a third run may have corrected the the problem, but I doubt it.
I also have to wonder if the top of the laptop was completely flat. The results on even a slightly curved surface will give you engraving at various depths.
Now, I don’t want everyone to get the Idea that I’m blaming OP. Personally I would have told Op no, simply because I didn’t want to be the one responsible for ruining a 1000.00 + laptop. If pressed OP should have been warned that the results can’t and won’t be guaranteed.
Folks there is only so much you can do with a laser engraver. We even hemmed and hawed at doing glass because the results were unpredictable and that substrate was on the list. Unlike laptops… I don’t remember ever seeing laptops on the list.
Now, I don’t want everyone to get the Idea that I’m blaming OP. Personally I would have told Op no, simply because I didn’t want to be the one responsible for ruining a 1000.00 + laptop. If pressed OP should have been warned that the results can’t and won’t be guaranteed. ???
cover the top part with tape or other to prevent the streaking. you might ask him to try it or other material. non flameable with rubber band to hold it and minimize the exposed area from getting streaked.
why? Have you considered getting the case replaced and redone? The black macbook isn’t that new, but if you’re planning on using it a lot it’s a consideration..
and what is 100% in agreement with Shane on this. I have 1.5 years experience running an Epilogue laser engraver. there are settings, Speed and power, that are used with a variety of Substrates. A second maybe even a third run may have corrected the the problem, but I doubt it.
The photos is seem good, which engraver is this by?
That’s a great way to mod your Macbook Case!
It’s pretty obvious whose it is now if it’s ever stolen, which happens all to often these days.
I’m running a uls laser, and I was getting stuff like that when my laser tube went bad.
Either the laptop wasn’t level, or the tube is going bad.
Gary
bad tube, plus a bad dpi setting or halftoning BS if on a ULS.
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