Laser Engraving and Cutting Wooden and Plastic Rulers

This Sample Club project was submitted to us by Epilog Laser customer Dick Reed of Reed's Woodworking and Laser Engraving. Rulers make excellent promotional or thank you gifts because they not only indicate the precise results Epilog systems can deliver, but they're extremely practical as well. Here we feature two ruler designs. Dick provided the first design, which is a traditional ruler design and can be customized for you or your customers on wood, plastic, acrylic, or any number of materials. We added a second file design for a multi-functional ruler cut out of plastic that features traditional measuring tools, as well as common stencil shapes, borders, etc.

We'd like to thank Dick for sharing his creative design and vision! Have a project you’d like to share in Epilog’s Sample Club? Email Amy Dallman at amyd@epiloglaser.com to learn how you can be featured in one of our newsletters!

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Materials Needed

Wood sheets - anything larger than 12" x 1" will do. (We used 14.5" x 4.5" alder planks from Colorado Heirloom.)
Plastic/acrylic sheets at least 14" x 12" (optional - this will accommodate the more intricate ruler design.)
An Epilog Laser System

Laser engraved and cut ruler in the laser.

Open the file sc_ruler_wood and customize the file with your company's contact information and logos.

The machine used for this project was a 50-watt Epilog Helix and we used the following settings:

Wood Engraving: 70% speed, 100% power
Wood Cutting: 10% speed, 50% power, 500 frequency

Select the file you wish to engrave and insert the correlating material. Send the job to the laser with the appropriate settings for your material.

To create the multipurpose ruler, follow the same steps as above with your desired material. For this sample we used an engraveable plastic on a 50 watt Helix laser system.

Plastic Engraving: 100% speed, 30% power
Plastic Cutting: 30% speed, 50% power, 5000 frequency.