Galloping towards failure

So the reason I can get away with buying expensive toys like the Glowforge is because my wife buys expensive toys too. Meet the newest transportation purchase this week at our house:

(Bella)

So of course along with bella comes astonishingly expensive accessories and my wife as you see is quite short so needed her stirrup leathers shortened with an extra hole. So she asked me “do we have anything that can push holes in leather?” “bwahahaha, as I retreat to the skull covered island where I keep the GF”… First off came the challenge of figuring out how to get a 4’ long stirrup leather into the GF (man this is where the Pro would be great'. But through creative use of gorilla tape and a wire tie, managed to get it all in there (I used a magnet to mark the hole location since the camera really isn’t good on dark objects). I was a bit worried the head would run into the bundled strap so taped it to the front of the case.

Now here is where someone like @morganstanfield is laughing since she undoubtably knew that stirrup leathers aren’t solid leather! They are a leather wrapped nylon strap (like a climbing strap) which the GF really doesn’t cut well at all. I figured this was a good time to mark the strap with Bella’s name since we lease the horse back to the stable as a school horse (offsets the costs a bit and is a nice community thing to do). I started with the heavy leather settings and fired it up. The leather cut beautifully, but that stupid stuff in the middle resisted 6 passes at high “laserness” despite picking out the charred contents after each triple pass.

Since optical alignment isn’t quite up to snuff this of course kept slightly widening the hole (and the flare from the straps in the middle (I suspect nylon) burned the hole out of shape which didn’t endear my wife to me on this, left it as you see. The engrave looks great through.