Laser Etching Chips? (1 Viewer)

[Mental Nomad]

Has anyone tried, or heard of someone trying, laser-etching chips? Especially ceramics?

I'm toying with the idea of a ceramic set made to look like an old ivory chip set. The base colors/patterns would be set in the dye on the ceramic, and then the denom/design that would have been scrimshawed would be laser-etched.

 

[QuiQuog]

There was say guy who did it a few years ago. There are some threads on it over at CT with pictures. Mostly on softer chips though. The faux clay chips took well to the laser. It didn't work well with ASMs due to the brass flakes in them. If I remember correctly, ceramics melted under the laser. Don't quote me on that though.

 

[Meddler2]

Asm chips worked fine. A friend had a set of the Hmold blanks from Apache done. Came out very nice. I had a set of faux clays done and they also came out great. The sample chip he sent me (sorry forgot his name) was actually an asm chip.

 

[Mental Nomad]

Hearing that it worked well on clays makes me think about using it to serial-number mine...

And I'll have to see how well it works on my Matsui / Franklin hundo plaques... Fortunately, I bought 21 of them, not 20...

 

[links_slayer]

It was a while ago, but I remember seeing a ceramic chip with a "mold" etched or lasered into the outer edge of the face. Maybe it as Joe at PGI? I don't think it was Jason at lazerchips.com but I could be wrong.

 

[jbutler]

@Jeff had these done years ago and always thought they were some of the better lasered faux clays out there.

 

[Mental Nomad]

Thanks! The 1 looks great, the 100 needs a little help with contrast...

This is definitely going to take experimentation. Probably need different powers and cut rates for different chips and different colors. I'm hoping that lasering a ceramic blank gives a good burn, but if it doesn't give a nice dark burn, it would probably be better to just do the scrimshaw art in ink. Might still be able to laser serials on chips, but that's not appropriate for a set trying to look like old ivories...

 

[bmichaelhorn]

I tried laser etching some bcc t mold chips. They have the same problem as the examples shown above, lack of contrast. One thing I tried that seemed somewhat promising was to spray paint the laser etched portion with metallic spray paint. I put double stick tape over the top of the chip before laser etching and then kept it on while spray painting to act as an overspray guard. Came out great but for the amount of effort and what may be less durability I think hot stamping is a much better option.