At London Hackspace we got a laser cutter a month or two ago. Despite being cheap (for a laser cutter) and of anonymous Chinese provenance, it’s pretty reliable, very useful, and great fun to use.

I recently got a new Macbook Pro, and I was thinking of what to etch the lid with. (Most metals won’t etch — let alone cut — on our 40W laser cutter, but anodized aluminium is the exception.) Laser cutters work best with vector drawings; you can etch raster images but on our machine this leaves a “shadow” on anodized aluminium due to the laser starting up.

So I wanted a cool vector image to etch my laptop with, and I decided to use a picture of a particle collision in a bubble chamber. I found this image and traced it using Inkscape. I’m pretty happy with the result.

Laser Etched Macbook

More photos

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