Joe, Which color Alumamark? I found (by total mistake) that I only get good black lettering on the silver if it is about 1/8" out of focus. So I set my manual focus on a small sample piece of acrylic, then laser the silver and it comes out great. If I set the focus for the actual thickness of the alumamark it comes out a dull gray or brownish. I have a 25w Universal, I use the settings of 50p 50s.

Harold

Bieb,

I took Mike's advise in the first response to this post. I set all the colors in the print driver to setting of 2% power difference for each color and burned 2"x 3/4" boxes and picked the best result. I've had lousy luck in the past with the silver. I got great results with the gold. I'm going to go through the same setting process with the siver and see what settings are best. Turns out with my 1oow setting of 9% power and 99% speed is optimum at 1000 ppi and a density setting of 5. I'll let you know on the silver later today.

I've had my own share of mishaps with alumamark, it's a really delicate product to engrave, but once I got it engraving alright it's been very popular with the clientelle. I took the advice from the brochure that came with it when i bought it from johnson plastics and it worked just fine for me with the ULS 25e running at 55pwr and 80spd 500dpi.

Bieb you should check this very interesting post about true focus distance;
http://engravingetc.org/forum/index.php?webtag=EE&msg=1672.5