Laser Etching A Pumpkin

I had seen posts other places about laser cutting and etching a pumpkin so I figured I'd give it a try on my lunch break. I was hoping to use our rotary attachment but the pumpkin I had was too big. So this first try is with a stationary one. All I did was raster this time...need to get a few more smaller ones and I'll try to vector cut them.

First I made a basic design on Inkscape. Then I found the flattest section I could and propped the pumpkin up. After setting "home" for the laser, I set the properties and we gave it a try.

We have an Epilog Mini 60Watt machine. I set it to raster with the following settings:

Speed 50, Power 100, DPI 600, Engrave direction - bottom up, Image dithering - Jarvis.

I had the laser raster the design 4 times to get the between 1-2mm deep.

Not bad for a first try.

A few days later, we tried 2 more pumpkins. For the smaller one we used the rotary tool (that spins the object while lasering...great for etching glass jars or "hydroflasks")...got a wavy effect but it's cool. Then tried a green "pumpkin". Not bad results: