Laser: Etching a Niche

By Regan D. Dickinson

Laser etching is a technology where the potential and applications appear limitless – but, for right now, laser-etched stonework is still getting its footing.
It’s not a contradiction, either, when taking a quick look at the present state of laser-etched stone working. There’s plenty of work going on, especially in the monument industry; however, lasers aren’t popping up in every fabrication shop just yet.
The numbers will grow, however, as more work moves into standard commercial and residential installations. What’s certain is that the practical and theoretical elements of laser etching will begin to merge, while the limits push to the edge.
“We’ve mostly been etching dark stone, but we’re discovering that there may even be a reverse effect utilizing a lighter stone. There’s a lot of exploration yet to do,” says Jeronimo Martin, general manager of Aquarius Laser Etching & Design in Woodland, Calif. “It’s a pretty new area, and we’re pushing on the frontier trying to figure things out as we go along. There’s no road map to follow from where we’re at.”

HOW IT WORKS
Laser etching, long a staple for decorating glass, plastics and wood, is gaining ground in the stone trade. Manufacturers such as VyTek of Littleton, Mass., and CamTech Industries Inc. of Calgary, Alberta, brought the laser to large-scale dimensional stone in the North American market; other companies, such as Universal Laser Systems of Phoenix and Epilog Inc. of Golden, Colo., are eyeing the stone market as well.
Unlike CNC and other fabricating equipment, lasers don’t do any of the heavy lifting or cutting with stone. It’s a way to customize a job without labor-intensive hand-carving, and benefits from the graphic capabilities of standard computer design software.
Typically, it’s the darker stones – such as black granite and marble – that best highlight the laser-etching process. The laser creates what’s essentially a grayscale image by burning off the surface of the stone. The deeper the laser burns, the lighter the now-exposed surface becomes – almost white at its deepest and almost black at its shallowest.
Once etched, a classic black-and-white image emerges. Because laser etching is computerized, the image can be a photograph, a painting, or any image a designer can think of that can be ultimately rendered electronically.
Kevin Thuet, director of operations for Advantage Laser Technologies in St. George, Utah, uses a combination of software to render laser-etched images.
Typically, the file is brought into Adobe Systems Inc.’s Photoshop® for touch-up work and to bump up the resolution., since many clients bring in relatively small images and the laser is capable of handling 6′ x 10′ materials. Thuet uses LizardTech Inc.’s Genuine Fractals™ to work on additional resolution and size issues.
Photoshop, meanwhile is used touch up the image – fix blemishes, the subject’s hair, or anything else to make the image cleaner, adjust contrast or eliminate any unwanted extras, like obstructing trees and foliage. Thuet says he’s even transposed the head of a customer onto actor Vin Diesel’s.
Once the touch-up work is completed, a new file is created in Ulead System Inc.’s PhotoImpact® and saved at the size and dots-per-inch (dpi) resolution at which the image will be engraved. PhotoImpact also creates the right file type for Thuet’s VyTek laser.
When the image is blown up to the correct size, jagged lines will show themselves and will be further cleaned up before the file is sent to the engraving program – in this case, PhotoGraV from Schrock’s Computer Works in Goshen, Ind. – and on to the laser.
What emerges is a photorealistic image that can then be painted, tiled to form a larger piece, and cut and inlaid precisely for just about any application.
The applications themselves run the gamut from residential to commercial, and many applications in between. Those running laser-etching machines are also using it for glass, mirrors, wood and even for cutting intricate plastic pieces. Precision and versatility are certainly selling points to those who use them and the customers they serve.

MAKING IT WORK
Stone applications include corporate logos, floor and wall murals, signage, kitchen backsplashes, custom furniture, countertops, shower walls, patios and entryways. Of course smaller items – like awards, paperweights and other gifts – are part of the production mix, but larger-scale commercial and residential projects hold a lot of promise.
The trick is getting the word out to builders, architects, designers and other professionals who can use the process for key accents in their projects that create an upsell opportunity.
“People have to see it and understand the full process. If I have someone here where I do the work, it’s very easy to make the sale – it’s really effortless,” says Samuel Buck, laser manager for La Tierra Interiors in Bernalillo, N.M.
Companies selling their laser-etching services are finding that most people don’t know about it, or don’t understand the possibilities. They agree that it’s something that has to be seen in person.
“The show we did in Vegas recently – the International Builders Show – was our first real national show, and we had tremendous feedback,” says Aquarius Laser’s Martin. “The people who were most attracted were high-end custom home builders. That’s where we received at least 75 percent of our serious contacts. Some placed some orders right there at the show.”
Martin says that a lot of them wanted pieces produced for their offices so that they could, in turn, sell the process to their clients. One project from Aquarius Laser’s VyTek that created a number of on-the-spot sales was an 8’ x 10’ floor project with an intricate compass and ship design on it.
“Someone pulled out the plans right there who wanted to put it in a home he was working on in San Jose,” says Martin.
Martin adds that a few large-scale builders were serious buyers. However, high rises and other giant building projects demand exacting specifications and code requirements, which will take additional research and preparation for Aquarius Laser and others to handle the potential demand.
“The applications seem to be pretty wide. It’s mind-boggling as a new company making sure that we focus enough on one area that we achieve what we want to, instead of being overwhelmed by all the areas we can try to go into,” says Martin.
The strong laser preference for black marble and granite doesn’t appear to be a concern for potential buyers. Though these two substrates are most often used, other materials – like flagstone, travertine and lighter-colored stones – are finding some applications. Lighter stones, for example, could be engraved as a negative, though grays are most difficult to image either way.

A MATTER OF PLACEMENT
Whatever the color characteristics, the stone has to be chosen for its physical application – outdoors versus indoors and wall versus floor.
“For floor inlays granite is really the substrate to use,” says Hal Edmonds, owner of California Laser in Sacramento, Calif., who produces work with a CamTech. “We use marble for anything decorative; it really gives a sharp image. It took us awhile to find a source of some really good clear material that has little or no veining it, and even the best granite has some graining and crystals in it.”
Once the substrate is selected and engraved, it can either be rendered as a black-and-white image or painted. An etched and painted piece has a unique quality that combines the aesthetics of a painting with the natural beauty of stone. All of the subtleties of such a piece cause quite a stir with builders and consumers alike.
“We colorize with oil paints for marble and acrylics and litho paints for granite, and basically scrub it in with a Q-Tip®,” says Advantage Laser’s Thuet. “It takes probably only one color of green, for instance, to do all of the trees. Because of the gray-scaling it looks like you’ve got many shades of green.”
Aquarius Laser has an in-house painter who renders the company’s laser-etched color products. The grayscale component of laser etching means that the brightness of the final color embedded in it can be manipulated in the digital file by tweaking the depth of burn.
“When we paint something on the stone, it’s really being absorbed and is staining it. When you feel the pieces after it’s been painted it feels like you’re feeling the stone,” says Jeronimo Martin. “Then we put a number of sealants on top of that to protect it from UV rays, weather and more. The colors should last as long, or longer, than any public mural in exposed outdoor environments because the paint is being absorbed into the stone itself and is properly sealed. Indoors, we have no longevity concerns.”
Even that process is going beyond methods, as seen at last year’s Marmomacc exhibition in Verona, Italy. Zonato, a Chiampo, Italy-based manufacturer of fabrication machinery, introduced a combination laser-etcher/inkjet printer for stone. The printing mechanism, from LAC Corp. in Tokyo, directly prints onto laser-etched surfaces as large as 6.5’ X 14.7’
While laser etching is proving its versatility – in application, colors and material – it continues to prove itself as a viable architectural accent, both residential and commercial. The key will be educating clients to garner widespread acceptance and usage.
Regan D. Dickinson is a free-lance writer and editor, with an extensive background in covering industrial-graphics topics.

This article first appeared in the March 2003 print edition of Stone Business. ©2003 Western Business Media Inc.