The New Hotness

Flushed with success from engraving a hard drive platter for the 21HB5A tube, I bandsawed an acrylic square from a scrap sheet and unleashed the diamond drag bit on it:

That’s side-lit against a dark blue background. The long scratch and assorted dirt come from its protracted stay in the scrap pile.

If you look closely, you’ll see a few slightly wider loops, which came from a false start at Z=-0.1 mm.

Engraving at -0.5 mm looked pretty good:

Despite an angular resolution of 2°, the curves came out entirely smooth enough. The gritty scratchiness resulted in a pile of chaff covering the engraved area; perhaps some oil or lube or whatever would help.

Rescaling the pattern to fit a CD platter worked fine, too:

Polycarbonate seems to deform slightly, rather than scratch, leaving the final product with no chaff at all:

In this case, the doubled lines come from the reflection off the aluminized lower surface holding all the data.

That CD should be unreadable by now …

[Update: Welcome, Adafruit! More on Guilloché pattern generation and engraving them with the MPCNC. ]