Customizing a Cork Bulletin Board with a Laser

Cork is an exceptionally popular engraving material in the industry. Because of its durability and sustainability, many engravers offer customization services on this hearty material.

Here we'll show you how we customized various sizes of cork bulletin boards with the laser. With the right settings, we found this material to engrave beautifully with great contrast and texture.

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Tarvittavat materiaalit

Cork bulletin boards - available at office supply chains, super-store retailers, and online. We purchased ours through Amazon.
An Epilog Laser System

We used a 120-watt Legend 36EXT with the following settings: 100% speed, 10% power.

Keep these helpful tips in mind when performing this project:

Make sure your board will fit in your engraver - pay close attention to the dimensions of your bulletin board or you won't be able to engrave it because it won't fit!
Make sure to account for any framing during the design process. If your board has a one-inch frame around it, your engraving area becomes smaller.
Even using high speed and low power (100%/10%) cork engraves very well. Almost too well for graphics that are 100% black. We converted all of our artwork to various shades of gray (40 - 80 % black) to avoid scorching.

Insert your bulletin board in the engraving system. Open the file you'd like to engrave and make appropriate changes to text/design.

When you're done customizing the design, draw a vector box around it and send ONLY the vector job to the laser with the red dot pointer on. That way you can see exactly where your design will go. Adjust as necessary.