Background
People have long found miraculous faces and mysterious apparitions in food, clouds, stains, and sundry ordinary places. The list below consists of a few highly publicized (in the US) recent manifestations. Not surprisingly these appearances are usually linked to religious figures.
Discontented with my apparition-free foodstuffs, I took advantage of access to a laser engraver and the ultimate Christmas gift was born. Be the first on your block to own a miracle! Why pay the big bucks on ebay for grilled cheese sandwiches or stained X-Boxes?
Process
The fabrication of the toast apparitions is pretty easy, the list below should get you through it.
- Find some time to kill
- Get access to a laser etching system
- Locate a collection of images you wish to enshrine on the ultimate canvas, toast.
- Convert the images to grayscale.
- Manipulate the images to have high contrast. It can be helpful to use the burn tool to highlight areas you want to show up, like the eyes and mouth.
- Find a bread with a nice tight pore structure so that you can get maximum resolution. White bread is a good choice, and for certain applications (i.e. Estrada) other breads such as tortillas or pita may be desirable.
- Dry the bread by leaving it out on a wire rack or similar. You want it to dry evenly so that the bread doesn't curl. You may need to restrain the bread between two sheets.
- Import the image to be printed into the laser engraving software of your choice.
- Experiment with laser power and speed to find the right combination for your bread. For the bread pictured, I found that 50% power and full speed gave good results on our 25W CO2 laser.
- With the right settings in hand, burn some bread.
- I found that in order to make the toast look more natural, it helped to touch the toast up with a propane torch.
- I also used the laser system to cut plexiglass frames for preserving the toast. You will have to design your holder to match your bread, but I used 1/4" thick pieces for the front and rear panels, with a 1/2" spacer layer. See schematic of frame
- To prevent degradation of the bread, I made sure the bread was dry and then applied epoxy to the front and rear panels, assembled the panels with spacer and bread and pulled a vacuum on the whole thing. The result is that I hope there isn't much in the bread chamber to react with the bread or feed any organisms. Time will tell.
- To take advantage of the clear packaging, I burned a different face on each side of the bread, which is nice if you get sick of seeing Ponch you can flip to Kim Jong Il.
Results
Send all comments to jmengel@insightbb.com
