I especialy like the idea of the figuere 8. Not blowing off in the wind. But stil not girdle for a while.
I wonder if a “strechted” mild “twist” also works. Hard to discribe what i mean. Like folding the leftoverwire together. stretching it, and giving it a mild twist.
im not sure about the not girdeling though. I don’t see how roundness matters. The wire will just form to whatever shape your tree is when the lib surface area gets bigger than the surface area of the wire loop.
My arm isen’t perfectly round. But if it tie it tight enough with a string i can stil cut off my bloodflow.
It’s likely not a problem. it will take a while before the tree’s get big enough.
I have some embedded in this tree, although at a crotch. Your arm is not rigid like a tree. If there are any valleys, they get bridged by the tightened wire.
I think even if it was perfectly round, and pierced the cambium, it would heal over.
With a big tree like that one, I suppose I could just staple one end of the wire to the tree and let the tree absorb the staple and wire
Just need to make sure I don’t try to cut there with my silky saw 10 years from now.
Industrial Sharpie. The grooves are very narrow, so the marking material needs to either get applied only in the small recess, or needs to flood and overflow, then needs to be removable from the flat surface.
Apparently the Sharpie I’m using is not longer in production:
I have a pack of those, 2 ended ones, maybe from recommendation here. The tips don’t fit in the groove as well, I think the plastic surrounding the tip on the industrial Sharpie guides it in, I can then use the indent to guide it.
Mine is a K40 as well but I scrapped the crappy controller it ships with and installed a MiniGerbil controller from AwesomeTech. It allows me to use Lightburn software which is tremendous. I also removed the existing small bed and custom fabbed a new larger bed. Honestly, I would never use the machine if I hadn’t upgraded the controller. The stock controller and that crappy whisperer software is useless. Installing the MiniGerbil and using lightburn turned it into a very capable and powerful device. I still really only use it when my creative juices are flowing. Everyone always asks me if I’ve lasered anything lately and usually I say no because I simply cannot think of any interesting projects to make. Most recently I made a bunch of custom Christmas ornament last Christmas.
Tried something a little different with tags today. Instead of 3d printing or acrylic I used birch ply. Yes probably a terrible idea but it’s really just an experiment to see how they hold up. After lasering the only, I submerged them 3 separate times in Arm-R-Seal Uerothane. If anything it will be a good test of Arm-R-Seals UV protection.
I found the holy grail for tree tags at work today stuck in an old desk. I work in a mine and these are brass miners tags. In times past they would typically be embossed with your name and employee number. But now a days they no longer use these types of tags. They were about to throw them in the dumpster when I stopped them and brought them home. I do not have a punch set but they are reasonably cheap at harbor freight. Funny how I’ve gone to great lengths to make tree tags out of 3d printed plastic and laser engraved acrylic and wood and these end up falling into my lap. The larger tags are 2" while the smaller tags are 1.5". There are several hundred in that box.
Great tread with a lot of interesting ideas (stainless steel Dymo labels, wow).
As a plant hybridizer for better than 40 years I’ve tried a great many tags and labels, DIY and otherwise. To this day, for crosses I scissor half-inch strips from yellow vinyl report binders, write the crosses on them with a Sharpie pen, poke a hole in them with a sheet rock screw and tie them onto the ovary with 26 gauge, painted steel florist wire. The Sharpie markings fade away and the wire and vinyl disintegrates eventually but they last the few months they need to.
For more robust needs I have settled on 3/4" wide aluminum banding, the kind that gets clamped around boxes on pallets. Letter-stamping is tedious but neater than inscribing my handscratch. 20 gauge aluminum floral wire provides enough strength to hold the label but enough yield to prevent girdling. Aluminum wire also prevents corrosion which would otherwise occur if I used a different material with the aluminum tags.
Avery offers a (pricey) chemical-resistant, weather-proof, UV-proof laser-label material they call “UltraDuty™ White Film”. I use it to label the arbors.
These labels are typically not found at retail, and be careful to specify the exact material and size in their tedious online ordering process and also to download the proper mail-merge template:
The labels in the photo above are “1-1/3” x 4" Rectangle Labels". The corresponding mail-merge template is “Presta® 94206”. Also be careful when placing labels, the adhesive backing is tenacious:
I just ordered the punch and wire. I’ve been using brown anodized aluminum flashing from Menards which I cut with my wifes scissors. I scribe onto the aluminum. Very easy to read.
I started out using flashing but strapping turned out to be less expensive in the long run and eliminates the dangerous sharps and slivers that result from shearing the flashing.
When I run out of free extras I’ll take you up on that suggestion! We have scrap extra metal roofing from a shed at work that I’ll be working through first though.
Thought I’d post an update if the tags I’ve experimented with. The 3D printed tags are 5 years old now. They are holding up nicely. The acrylic tags are either 3 or 4 years old. Can’t remember exactly. They too are holding up fine although the painted infill is mostly disappeared. The etching is still fine. Lastly, the birch ply tags that were etched 2 years ago as an experiment are not holding up very well as you can expect. The brass mining tags will be epic if I ever manage to use them. Maybe that will be a project this spring to replace the ply tags. I’ll post pictures if I get around to making the tags.
