Engraving Guilloché Patterns

Engraving Guilloché Patterns

Via the Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning blog by Ed Nisley comes a post about engraving Guilloché patterns.

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 (above).

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:

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.

See the blog for for additional details and pictures.


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