Fun with Tile: Engraving Coasters

Today we engraved these tiles on our Glowforge. *Note I don’t own the rights to these photos and will not be selling them. I searched online for some black and white Star Wars artwork. I wanted a variety of styles to see how they’d turn out.

These pictures were taken into Affinity Design to resize them to about 4” by 4” and then loaded into the Glowforge app.

The tiles I used were bought from Lowes. At only $0.15 each they made great candidates to practice on. The tiles did have a glue like substance on the front of them. I’m not sure if they were shipped that way or if something got spilled on them at the store. It was easily removed with some rubbing alcohol and a scrapper.

In the Glowforge app I used the settings .27 thickness, 500 speed, full power, and 450 DPI. Then it was time to push the magic button

Once done the tile doesn’t look like much but we’ll fix that

Using an oil based paint marker ( I used Sharpie brand). Color in all of your lines making sure the ink goes down into the engraving.

This is how it will look once you’re done. Don’t worry it will get better. Once the ink is dry use a damp Magic Eraser to gently scrub off the ink that’s not in the engraving. Once you have that done wipe it down with a paper towel.

As you can see below line art seems to work the best for this method. The coasters that have more of an artwork look are hard to clean without removing parts that aren’t supposed to be removed.

The last thing to do is to add some felt or cork to the bottom so they don’t scratch up your table.

Here are a few more sets that we made. Some odd old medical and motorcycle patents.