Cermark / Thermark Metal Marking Spray

The TherMark process utilizes marking materials, or “inks,” available in various forms, which are applied to surfaces to be marked. The ink is then selectively fused – using patented laser marking technology – to the surface with a regular industrial marking laser. Finally, any excess ink is easily cleaned from the surface. The inks are scientifically formulated to make a permanent, chemical bond to surfaces, without compromising or damaging the material being marked.

TherMark marking materials are available as paintable liquids, aerosols or adhesive transfer tapes. The paintable liquid may be applied to surfaces with a brush, sponge or air sprayer. After fusing with the laser, any excess paintable liquid or aerosol spray can be cleaned from the surface by simply rinsing with water. Tapes are applied to surfaces using their own light adhesives. After fusing with the laser, the tape is lifted from the surface, carrying away any excess marking material. The used tape is then discarded.

Regardless of the application, the end result is a durable, high-contrast and high-resolution mark. (as appears from the Thermark web site) … Continue Reading

Working with CorelDraw’s Object Manager and How It Controls Your Engraver.

The object manager can be found in the “Tools” menu. See Figure 1. Note: for this example, make sure you have no objects on your page – so start a new file. … Continue Reading

Creating an Auto Layout in CorelDraw

Help File – Autolayout

Level – Intermediate to Advanced

For anyone who has owned a rotary engraver the one feature that we miss when we go to CorelDraw is a simple auto layout.

What is Auto Layout? Well basically it is a command that was controlled by one key. When you pressed this key your text and or logos would automatically space themselves out on the engraving plate.

CorelDraw can do this put it lacks the one-keystroke approach that we had in our rotary engraving software.

In this tutorial we will show you how to create a couple of an Autolayout a couple of different ways.

Once we have created the Autolayout we will create a one-button hotkey to activate the Autolayout.

To do this we will need to create what is known as a Macro. … Continue Reading

Now let me ask you – how many people come into your shop and say “I need you to reproduce my logo and to make it easy here is some good quality black and white artwork”. Not often. What do we get?

• Low quality gif and jpeg files (images from the internet)
• “Faxed” artwork – the ones with the “jaggies”
• Business cards
• Full colour images

The list goes on. So what can we do? Typically what I see is that dealers scan the bad image into the computer, vectorize the artwork and then sometimes spend hours “cleaning” up the logo. This may be a suitable way of doing artwork for some but not me. I would rather spend my time doing something else. So let me offer you an alternative that will give you a good clean vector image and hopefully do it in a lot less time. … Continue Reading

Getting Started – Creating a 1 by 3 Name Badge

When we are looking at using CorelDraw we have to start some where. For most of us this means creating some sort of layout. When you are working in CorelDraw everything you do is a layout. In this section we will look at creating two different products. These exercises are intended to be easy and straight forward. The first product will be a basic 3 line engraving name plate. There will be no logo just text. The second lesson will deal with creating a laser engraved plate which incorporates a logo and some text. … Continue Reading

Resolving The Scanner Ratings Confusion

Scanner manufacturers like to use numbers such as 600-by-1200dpi but sometimes these numbers can be misleading.

The optical resolution is determined by the scanner’s sensor usually a CCD array and the number of individual elements in the sensor. For example, a 600-by-1200 dots per inch scanner has 600 elements per inch. But the sensor reads only one scan line at a time. The second number is the mechanical resolution, which indicates the number of steps the stepper motor takes when moving the sensor down the flatbed. So a 600-by-1200 dpi scanner offers a 600 dpi optical resolution and a 1,200 dpi mechanical resolution. … Continue Reading

Somewhere in the list of the Top Ten Things We Take for Granted, you’d have to include electricity. But the time to think about electricity is before you have a problem. How do you protect your computer from damage or data loss when good power goes bad? … Continue Reading

Creating a Seal Die Using the Blend Tool

By Mike Clarke
Oct 1, 2003, 23:28

One of the things that you may have to do if you own a laser is to create a seal die and corporate logo. You can do this one of two ways. One is to use the repeat command where you repeat the image until you fill up your circle. The second is to use the blend tool. This article will talk about using the blend method.

Figure 1 is an image of a seal die that I created in CorelDraw. The following exercise will take you through creating the image. … Continue Reading

Creating Text that is filled with an Image – Using CorelDraw’s Power Clip

There are times where you may want to superimpose text on top of an image so that the image shows through the text. This is quite easy and can be a very good selling feature.

First let us load in a picture and some text. Figure 1 shows some text called “Power Clip” and a photo. … Continue Reading