Laser etching the dash

The center instrument panel has three switches for the bilge pump, horn and lights. I also have the ignition and choke switches to the right of the steering wheel. To make legends for these switches I decided to laser etch the lettering into the maple and then fill in with brown epoxy.   I found St. Louis Laser in the yellow pages and set up a meeting with the owner Mike.  He runs the business out of the basement of his home, which just happens to be near where I live.  It was nice it was a small shop willing to do my small project. I could go over and watch the whole process.
The etching is done with a laser etcher connected to his PC.  We did one word at a time.  The etcher has a laser head that is mounted on an arm and can move in the X-Y direction.  The area it can cover is about 30" wide by 20" tall.  The laser is first positioned over the center of where you want the lettering using X-Y adjustment buttons.  Then the depth is adjusted by moving the base up and down. This is needed to focus the laser beam on the surface of the material.  The text is then entered into a drawing program (Mike uses Corel Draw) using the font that you want (Mike had the Magneto font.) The image is then just "printed" to the laser.  Before printing to the laser the software driver is adjusted for the material (wood > maple) and then power. You don't want to give it too much power or you get excessive burning.  It is better to take multiple passes at less power.

 

Here is the laser etching my Ignition and Choke labels.  These will be cut from the maple and inlaid into the mahogany dash. After the first etch, you manually run the etch two more times.  Each run takes a little more material and makes the cut deeper.  The laser goes back and forth like an old dot matrix printer advancing from top to bottom. The material does not move, only the laser head and arm.

 

 This is my instrument cluster getting the Horn legend. The Bilge is already done.
 

 Here is the completed etch on the cluster.  You can see there is a nice depth to the cut.  There was some sort of glitch in the software or the font.  The "Bilge" text printed a little higher than the other two legends even though we started each lettering etch on the same horizontal line.  Unfortunately, there are no do-overs unless I wanted to make a new panel (no, thank you.)

Finally, I used epoxy resin colored with brown pigment to fill in the lettering.  This turned into more of a challenge than I expected.  Tiny bubbles form in the resin and you don't notice it until you try and sand the finish down to bring out the definition of the lettering.  The little bubbles get sanded off and collect the maple sanding dust which creates white spots in the lettering.  I had to use a jeweler's loupe and dental pick to clean out these spots and refill.  It took several passes.  To anyone trying this I would recommend you do not sand the lettering but use a razor blade to trim the epoxy down and then hold the blade vertically and use it like a scraper to clean off any additional epoxy.  The scraping does not create the dust to collect in the bubble pockets.
Anyway, other than the Bilge being slightly out of alignment, I am pleased with the result.