Getting a clean metallic silver mark on black leatherette is one of those jobs that looks simple until you try it, and blank surface material tends to disappoint people who guess at the settings. That is the problem this build tackles: turning black leatherette bottle openers into promotional cocktail bar merchandise with crisp silver lettering, and showing exactly how the look is achieved.
The blanks are black stitched leatherette handle wraps from JP Plus and JDS. The artwork was prepared in Adobe Illustrator, where a manufacturer template, part GFT158, was modified and the path around the metal opener loop was adjusted with an Offset Path of 0.1 to 0.2 inches. The text reads 'TIPSYROBOT COCKTAIL BAR Las Vegas'. The maker ran the job on an Epilog Laser controlled through Epilog Job Manager, with the engraving direction set to bottom-up.
The settings stood out to me as quite restrained: 600 DPI at 80% speed and 15% power, with finer text dropped to 30% power. Focusing was done manually with a blue focus gauge rather than trusting an autofocus. To keep a whole batch aligned, a wooden or MDF jig with five cutout slots holds the openers, and a black metal ruler guide marked with imperial increments 1 through 8 sits alongside. Since these are promotional items for a cocktail bar, batch consistency matters, so a repeatable jig setup seems like a sensible approach in my view.
The result is sharp silver lettering against the black faux leather, and the maker shared the whole method so others can reproduce it. One trade-off worth noting: each different blank shape needs its own custom jig template, so scaling up to other products means building more jigs. There is also the question of how this look holds up on other colours, which has not been addressed yet.
Project by Maker Experiment. Watch it on their YouTube channel: