Kiss Cut Lettering with a Laser Cutter

2023-08-17 | By Kitronik Maker

License: See Original Project

Courtesy of Kitronik

Guide by Kitronik

A laser cuts or engraves by localised vaporisation of the surface. This literally ‎blows away some material.

If you are cutting then you get left with a hole all the way through the material, and ‎if you are engraving you are left with just a shallow crater.

Most laser cutters have options to cut or engrave in their software

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Laser Engraving is generally a raster operation - where a picture is broken into a ‎pattern of parallel lines and the laser is scanned over it turning on and off - much ‎like an old CRT display.

You can get some excellent effects with raster engraving - check out Emma's blog ‎on scan gap engraving.

'Kiss cutting' is a different laser technique that lightly engraves a surface, but the ‎laser doesn't follow a raster pattern, it follows a cut line. 'Kiss cutting' is especially ‎useful for engraving lettering.

A lot of fonts will not successfully raster engrave - the software requires an ‎engraved area to be 'closed', which only works if a font has 'thickness'. Where a ‎font will engrave, the nature of raster engraving means the lettering often looks ‎‎'pixelated'.‎

'Kiss cutting' more closely mimics handwriting, where letters are formed from ‎individual strokes. For script type fonts it works really well.

Here's a quick 'how to' on creating your own 'Kiss cut' ‎lettering:

We often use LibreCAD to make our laser cutter files. It’s a free 2D CAD package. ‎This blog will assume you are using it, but other 2D packages have similar ‎functionality.

To demonstrate I will use the short phrase:

"Laser Cutters cut with light"

First insert the text into LibreCAD using the text tool:

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This creates a single text object. To convert this into a path for the laser to follow, ‎select it and use the explode function.

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Using Explode converts the letters from objects into single lines. If you ‎use Explode Text into Letters, then it creates lots of objects as though you had ‎individually created each letter with the Text tool. This means that the letters are ‎still not lines, which is what we want for kiss cutting.

Once you have exploded your text if you want to rearrange the letters - for instance Rachel wanted swoopy lines to fit with her artwork:

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You can use the normal move, copy, rotate tools to do this.

I usually create a set of guides on another layer to help line everything up. Don't ‎forget to draw the outline of the shape you want to cut:

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Save your work and then open the .dxf file in your laser cutter software.

This is where we setup to 'kiss cut'. Our laser cutter cuts through the 5mm value ‎acrylic I used in this blog at a setting of 65% power and 6 speed.

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To 'kiss cut' I create another cut setting with drastically reduced power - to 15%, ‎and increased speed. This results in less energy being applied to the acrylic, with ‎the result that only the surface is vaporised.

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Kiss cut lettering shows up really nicely when illuminated from the side, such as ‎with our 35150 white or 3561 colour changing LED strips.

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Of course, kiss cutting doesn't just have to be for letters. Any item where you want ‎to engrave thin lines into the surface could be made using this technique - such as ‎this nifty see thru rule:

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