Start Your Own Jewelry Engraving Business with a Fiber Laser Engraver
If you want to start or grow your jewelry business, a laser engraver is a great way to expand your capabilities. By engraving jewelry, you can let your creativity shine through as you create personalized pieces for your clients. We'll explain how laser engraving can boost your business, how it works, what to look for when choosing a laser engraver, and why choosing OMTech is a smart move when adding a laser engraver to your business.
Unleash Your Creativity with a Laser Engraver
If you're already creating laser-cut jewelry, it's time to take your business to the next level. With a laser engraver, you can customize metals to engrave rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, and much more. If you can imagine it, you can create it by laser etching text, symbols, and numbers on all kinds of jewelry to make them truly one of a kind. This can help you attract customers to grow your laser engraving business and increase profits.
Having a laser engraver lets you bring your ideas to life and allows you to offer your customers an array of unique offerings. From something as simple as engraving an inscription on a ring to adding a symbol or text to earrings and necklaces, or even adding safety or medical information to a pendant, the possibilities are endless with a fiber laser engraver. You could even create your own line of engraved charms for bracelets, allowing your customers to collect multiple pieces from your collection to create their own sentimentally personalized charm bracelet.
How to Laser Engrave Jewelry
Lasers let you write on metal by chiseling away thin layers of the metal's surface using a narrow beam of light, thereby creating text or shapes. There are two types of lasers you can use to engrave metal: fiber and CO2. In general, fiber lasers are faster, more powerful, and can be used on a wider range of metals, but are more expensive than CO2 lasers. While cheaper, CO2 lasers cannot engrave all metals and are slower than fiber lasers.
Fiber lasers can easily engrave precious and non-precious metals since their low wavelength is more easily absorbed by bare metal. They typically use a fiber optic cable with the rare earth element ytterbium, which makes the laser beam strong and effective. As noted above, fiber lasers work much faster than CO2 lasers, which boosts your productivity by allowing you to engrave hard materials at top speed.
A CO2 laser runs an electrical current through glass laser tubes filled with carbon dioxide. The light refracts off mirrors inside the tube and is aimed at the product you want to engrave. Since its high wavelengths bounce off most metals, you cannot use a CO2 laser to engrave precious metals like gold, silver, and platinum.
You can, however, engrave aluminum and stainless steel with a CO2 laser by using a laser marking spray agent. To use a laser marking agent, you simply coat the metal with the marking agent, let it dry, and then you're ready to engrave. When you're done engraving your design, you can wipe off the remaining marking agent with a damp cloth and your piece is ready to go.
If you wish to engrave round objects like rings and bracelets, you'll need a fiber market machine that accommodates a laser rotary attachment, regardless of whether you're using a fiber or CO2 laser. A rotary attachment is critical for jewelry engraving, since, as the name suggests, it rotates an object 360 degrees while you are engraving it.
What to Look for in a Laser Engraver
When choosing a laser engraver, you should consider its laser, accuracy, working area, and safety features:
Laser
Think about the type of metal you plan to work with and choose your type of laser machine accordingly. Since fiber laser engravers are more expensive than CO2 laser engravers, a CO2 laser engraver can be a good first purchase if you're a new business, have a small number of projects, or are focused on aluminum and stainless steel engraving. As your business expands, however, you will likely want to add a fiber laser engraver to increase your production speed and the range of metals with which you can work.
Accuracy
Engraving jewelry is delicate and precise work, so you want to choose a laser engraver that is as accurate as possible. Look closely at both the machine's positioning accuracy and repeat position accuracy, which tells you how well the laser does at engraving in the right location and hitting that same spot over and over. These figures should be no more than a fraction of an inch, or around 1 to 2 mm.
Working Area
Choose a laser engraver with a working area that is large enough to handle the size of jewelry you plan to engrave. Generally speaking, the bigger the area the better since, though you may not need it today, having the larger space will allow you to engrave larger items in the future should you want to expand your focus.
Safety
You will want to ensure that your laser engraver has built-in safety features, such as laser protective glass and flame detection, and will automatically turn off if there's a problem or if it starts to tip over.
Engrave in Color with OMTech's MOPA Fiber Laser Engravers
OMTech offers cutting-edge Master Oscillator Power Amplifier (MOPA) technology that lets you engrave in a full spectrum of colors. To really set your business apart, choose one of OMTech's powerful MOPA fiber laser engravers, which allow you to quickly engrave in color on a wide variety of metals, such as stainless steel, copper, silver, brass, and gold.
MOPA works by creating oscillations that amplify the laser and produce quick and powerful pulses to rapidly heat up and engrave the metal in color. Without MOPA technology, a fiber laser's light path has a frequency of 500 kHz. MOPA increases the intensity of the laser fourfold to 4,000 kHz and can generate 100 W in output energy. The combination of this powerful beam and the introduction of air creates chemical oxidation on the surface of the metal which allows you to permanently alter the color of the metal as you engrave.
Contact OMTech to learn more about its full range of fiber laser machines and CO2 laser engravers and how MOPA fiber laser engravers can bring colorful designs to your jewelry business.
Why Choose OMTech?
Based in Southern California, OMTech is an industry leader in laser engraving. Its FM and MP Series Fiber Laser Markers and CO2 Lasers Engravers can help you create stunning metal designs to boost your jewelry business. OmTech's machines have some of the most powerful and accurate lasers on the market, with large working areas and excellent safety features.
OMTech offers easy financing options to allow you to put a laser engraver to use in your business right away. It also backs each of its machines with a generous two-year warranty and lifetime US-based expert technical support.
