what you need

Acrylic
Illustrator (techshop)
Laser Printer (techshop)

Using the lasers is a lot of fun. One thing that i like most about the the lasers is that you can raster different depths into the Acrylic.

Step 1: Laser Etched Gears at Differnt Depths...techshop

Place your Acrylic in the laser and focus. To force the laser push the focus button on the front panel. Using the up and down arrows to move the bed up and down to focus lasers. Remove the focus gauge and press reset to send the machine home.

When making your laser file make sure what you are cutting fits on to the martial.

Step 2: Laser Etched Gears at Differnt Depths...techshop

Working in Illustrator, make one gear in the upper left hand corner. Copy and paste the gear along the top of the page.
Select the first gear, then open the color window and set CMYK to C=0, M=0, Y=0 K=10. This will make the gear light gray. Select the second gear and set the C=0, M=0, Y=0 K=30, this will be a little darker gray. Do this to you hit black with each gear intill which is K = 100. You can mess around with the gray scale setting to see what will happen.

Hint: try the gradient tool as well

Step 3: Laser Etched Gears at Differnt Depths...techshop

To print from Illustrator open the File menu, move down to the print key. Click on the print key. The print dialog box will open, in the lower right hand side of the print dialog box click on the setup button. You will get a pop up menu, click the "continue" button. The laser print menu will appear. In the laser print box set the speeds and power to the recommend settings.

Step 4:

On front panel of the laser hit "go" and watch the laser go to work. Once the laser is done open the lid and look to see the different depths of the laser cut.