Basic Rotary Engraving for Beginners (and testing the Atomstack Maker R1 Pro)

One of the cool things you can do with a laser engraver is rotary engraving. This is a pretty cool way to add a personalized touch to something like a glass remote. Atomstack gave me the Maker R1 Pro rotary engraving kit to play around with, so in this video I'm going to show you how to use it. The tips and techniques I'm going to show though would work with any brand, not just Atomstack. I'll include links in the description for this particular model. Some stuff you need to rotary engrave is going to be a dial caliper. Atomstack includes one in this kit, but I had a nicer one, so I used that. You'll need a tape measure, preferably metric, which makes everything a lot easier. Again, this is included with the R1 Pro. A very small bullet level, also included. And you'll definitely want your laser safety glasses handy for this one. Most rotary engravers come with extension legs for your diode laser, and Atomstack's is no different. Extension legs would be easy enough to make if you had a 3D printer or some woodworking tools, but if nothing else, you could just use pint-sized paint cans. I did find, with these, use the screw like a clamp. Trying to put it through the little hole that's already on the leg will result in kind of a wobbly joint. The reason you need the extension legs is because the rotary device takes up a good bit of room underneath the laser, so you have to raise the entire thing up to make it fit. First I'm going to show you how to use the R2 roller. This is good for things like relatively straight cylinders. It's also good for heavier items, or things that are too long to safely fit on the R1 chuck. You do need to adjust the position of the rollers based on the diameter of whatever it is you're trying to engrave. I'm going to use beer cans for a lot of my test burns, so to do that I need to first figure out what the diameter of the beer can is. Based on the chart and the instructions, I need to set the roller to its widest position. This is pretty easy to do by removing two small thumb screws on the adjustable roller. Then you adjust the position of the motor itself so you have proper tension on the belt. Next you want to connect the cable to the stepper motor. Because I'm using an Atomstack A30 Pro laser, I'm going to use the Atomstack cable, but the kit also comes with a different one if you're using a different brand laser engraver. To use the R2, you first remove the y-axis connector from the stepper motor. The y-axis is then connected to the R2 roller. The R1 rotary chuck that I'm going to show later connects the exact same way. Next you want to make sure your roller is exactly parallel to the x-axis. I made this little jig to make sure this was quick, easy, and repeatable. It's essentially just a big square that allows me to reference off the y-axis. I'm going to mark my test can with this little black dot to help set my origin. I want that dot to be exactly 90 degrees facing straight up from the surface of my work table. I'm also going to take a moment and set my laser height right now. Now I'll be opening up Lightburn. Once the program's up, I'll make sure that my laser is connected. Then I'll go to the laser tools menu drop down and go to the rotary setup. Here I'm going to select the rotary type I'm using, which in this case is the roller. Next I'll enable rotary. The roller diameter is the diameter of the beer can that I measured earlier, so I'll put it in now. There's a calculator below that will tell you what the circumference of your cylinder is. That circumference gets added as the millimeters per rotation. You also want to make sure you enable rotary on your laser console. Next we'll set the origin. I'm going to click on the move tab and then I'm going to press my laser fire, which I have set to only be 3%. If you don't have this enabled, I go over how to do it in my making laser cut maps video, link in the upper right hand corner. This will fire the laser, which I then manually move to find that black dot I put on the can earlier. Next you're going to want to make sure you've got origin set from start from current position. That means the origin will start exactly wherever you manually place the laser. I decided to run a quick materials test to see if it would work on cylinders. This is a good way to find your optimum speed and power settings for your machine and the material you're engraving. In this case, I'm burning automotive primer off an aluminum can. Barely anything would do it. But I still wanted to try this out. Incidentally, I go over this a little more thoroughly in my last video, which I linked earlier. I'll also put a link in the description. After verifying my framing, I was ready to run the test. One thing I noticed when doing rotary with Lightburn is I always got this little warning. I think this is because the y-axis has no limit switch. Anyway, click continue and you'll be fine. The materials test went about how I expected it to, although I did notice one weird thing. The test pattern engraved is a mirror image from what was on my screen. To show what's going on, I did a simple engraving of my logo. And this is just an example of why I was doing testing on painted beer cans. It's a lot cheaper than doing my testing on stainless steel mugs. As you can see, my graphic was indeed coming out as a reverse image. I checked the laser preview to see what that looked like. That image wasn't reversed, so I went back to rotary setup to see if I could find anything there. And that's when I noticed this button. I turned on mirror output to rotary and then checked my preview again. This time the image showed reversed, so I decided to send it to the engraver and see what would happen. Now my engraving came out the right way. So, what was going on? As it turns out, not every manufacturer wires their rollers the same way, and if you reverse the direction of the roller, the y-axis is reversed. That's why the function exists in Lightburn. And further validation for doing testing on beer cans. The logo I was testing with before was a line diagram. Now I'm going to show how you trace an actual image. I imported this JPEG, right-clicked on it, and selected trace image. This brings up the trace image window where you can adjust the cutoff and threshold accordingly. Once it looked good to me, I hit OK. After I deleted the JPEG, I was left with a line drawing. I resized and oriented the image appropriately. For this test, I'm going to be engraving a wine bottle, so I went back to rotary setup and set my diameter and circumference based on the measurements I had taken from the bottle itself. I also adjusted the position of my image a little bit to make sure the origin was exactly center. This makes framing a lot easier. To engrave something long like a wine bottle, you use this little roller for the unsupported end. Realistically, this bottle was probably heavy enough not to need it. However, if you were engraving something like a stemmed wine glass, it would be essential. I fired the laser to set my origin. With that aligned, I set my laser height. I didn't do it here, but with glass, you typically want to raise the laser a little higher so it defocuses the beam and you get a more smooth pattern. After adjusting the speed and power for something that would be more appropriate for glass, I did a quick frame test. With everything looking good, I clicked start. I'll mention now that the reason the bottle is covered in the primer is because glass will reflect the laser, so you have to darken it somehow. A lot of people will use black tempera paint. I just used some spray primer because it was handy. I cleaned the primer off with some lacquer thinner so I could see the engraving. I thought it came out really well. Just a heads up, with things like glasses and bottles, it's important to get your settings just right so you don't crack the glass. Then I decided to finally move on to doing one of my black stainless mugs. When the engraving was complete, I cleaned it off with some more of the lacquer thinner. Usually people use acetone for this, but again, this is what I had handy in the shop. Overall, I'm awfully happy with how that came out. A rotary chuck is a bit more versatile than the rollers are, and it functions a lot in the same way. This is the tool you want to use for less regularly shaped things like that mug I did earlier. The three-jawed chuck comes with two sets of teeth that can be oriented in different ways to hold different objects. They're also the sort of thing that you could 3D print specialized ones for really odd shaped objects. For things like spheres and globes, you can use these pins and a little tailstock support. I was able to use the alignment jig I had made for the rotary chuck the same way that I did with the roller. When you turn the laser on and it does the auto-home, you want to make sure the laser is high enough that it doesn't hit the chuck. It's important to make sure whatever you're engraving is as level as possible. For curved surfaces, you'd want to make sure the center of your engraving is where the level is. Getting the y-axis perfectly aligned on the rotary chuck is really easy. After firing the laser, you just move it to line up with this little notch which is dead center on the rotary axis. Then I set my laser height, and when you do this, you got to be careful you don't bump the angle of your chuck. In Lightburn, you go back to the rotary setup menu and you change it to the chuck type. Like the rollers, you also set the object diameter based on whatever the fattest part of your engraving is going to be on. When you frame while using the rotary chuck, you really got to be careful to make sure the laser is not going to bump into the chuck jaws. At this stage, all the functions in Lightburn are exactly the same with the chuck as they were with the rollers. When the engraving had finished, it looked like it was good, but I want to show you a curious thing. This logo was supposed to be exactly 60 millimeters by 60 millimeters, but when I measured it across, I saw that it was 65, and the top and bottom was 60 as expected. This test, I was actually recreating something that I had already found out the hard way. My logo on this cup went on extremely elongated. It looked like an oval that somebody had sat on. So here's how to fix that. On this can, I made a reference mark at its uppermost point. I went back to the rotary setup menu. I clicked this little test button. This runs the chuck through its full travel based on the millimeters of rotation setting put into Lightburn. As you can see, the chuck was over-rotating. It wasn't much, but it was enough to throw off the size of my graphic. When I had done that cup I showed earlier, it was off by a lot more than this. I decreased the millimeters of rotation by 170 to 165 and tried again. This time it was a lot closer, but it was still going a little bit too far. I'd knocked it down to 160 millimeters per rotation, and this time it looks like I found the sweet spot. I did another beer can test to verify if this corrected the problem. After adjusting that setting, I had a perfect 60 millimeter by 60 millimeter engraving that matched what was on the screen. I swapped around the chuck jaws so I could try again with one of the insulated mugs. There's a lot of different ways you can set the chuck jaws. I would recommend trying to do one where you have the least amount of profile sticking up around it. When they stick up too high, it's pretty easy to have the laser bump into them and that screws everything up. The way I did these here was probably not the most optimum, but it did work out for this engraving. Once I got everything aligned and leveled, I reoriented and resized my graphic. In the rotary setup menu, I put in the diameter of the mug. There's a little bit of a continuity error here in the video, but I wanted to show that the rotation is the same no matter what's in the chuck. It seems to be with the Atomstack R1, it's always 160 millimeters per evolution. I carefully checked the framing again before starting my engraving. Like the straighter mug that I had done with the roller, this one came out really nice. I went on to try engraving a couple of 16 ounce pint glasses. I found that there weren't a whole lot of really great ways to configure the jaws on something as slippery as glass. The glasses I had were also thick-walled and pretty heavy, so that didn't help. I found the best configuration was to hold the glass from the outside and raise the laser up just a little higher. This is also good because it diffuses the beam. I did waste a few glasses, but I ended up figuring it all out and got some nice engravings. I only tried it once, but doing a mug with a handle on it was very easy. As far as the roller goes, I don't have any real complaints. These could be maybe just a little easier to adjust, but everything works fine. But it would be nice if there was a way for Atomstack to have oriented this motor to where it was always dead center of the rollers, just to make lining up your origin a little easier. But that, whatever, I get it. It works really good. No real complaints about the R2. For the R1, again, I like it about 90%. Only two complaints I have are this. You gotta be careful to really get it tight or it'll sag a bit. And it's fine with lighter things, but heavier stuff like this glass, I had to just be really careful to make sure I had this nice and tight. All right, so next I'd say these jaws, they gave a huge variety of ways to hold the object. But as I showed earlier, you gotta be careful to make sure the laser doesn't bump into your chuck and that can limit how big of a graphic you can put on whatever it is you're engraving. But I don't know that that's really a problem if you've got 3D printer capabilities because I've already thought of some ways I'd design new ones of these and this would be a super easy part to make. My other thought is it'd be cool if there was some sort of tailstock support that would work for these types of things. I mean, there's this for a sphere, but something with little rollers that could go under here, kind of like the part for the support on the roller on the R2. But again, that would actually be a fairly easy part to make. My only, I think, solid complaint on this that isn't something I could just engineer out is that I'd really love to be able to hold something like a cup from the bottom, but I can't level any further than full down. If this could have traveled just a little lower, that would be great. I mean, obviously I could prop up the back here to solve that issue. And I might do that in the future because I think holding a cup from the base would be a lot more solid. Than from the rim, and it leaves you with a larger area to engrave. So that's something I might play around with. And there may even be a mechanical stop in here that could be removed or adjusted. I don't know. Anyway, overall, this was fun to play around with. I think it's definitely more for the hobbyist than say a professional, but anyway, there it is.