Man Card (5 design options)
- Category
- Laser Projects
- Posted
- March 28, 2025
- By
- Jacob Lloyd — written with AI assistance, post-project
- Read time
- 4 min read
In plain terms: A fun weekend project: engraving a joke "Man Card" gift onto a metal business card with a desktop laser. It includes five ready-made AI-generated designs and the exact machine settings that worked. Total material cost was about 32 cents for a gift that gets a guaranteed laugh.
This one is a gag gift that came out looking better than it had any right to: a "Man Card" engraved on an aluminum business card. Hand it to someone when they earn it. Confiscate it when they don't.
- What it is: a metal Man Card engraved on an aluminum business card blank.
- What it costs: about $0.32 in material for the two cards I made.
- What you need: an xTool F1 (blue + IR laser), xTool Creative Space, and a graphic — I generated mine with AI.
- Time: 37 minutes total, and 20 of that was fiddling with the design.
About the title: the "5 options" are five AI-generated graphics, all shared below. I only engraved two cards — one black, one blue. The other three designs are sitting right there if you want them.
Tools
xTool F1 — 10 W blue diode laser plus 2 W infrared in one head. It's the machine behind every metal-card project on this site, including my black aluminum business cards.
xTool F1 slide extension — optional. Stretches the working area so you can run a row of cards instead of one at a time.
Material
Black aluminum business cards — the ones I used:
- 0.21 mm thick
- $7.99 for 50 cards; one card per Man Card
- $0.16 per card
Alternative materials
Multi-color aluminum cards:
- 0.21 mm thick
- I haven't bought these myself, but they look like they'd work
- $11.99 for 100 cards — about $0.12 per card
Thick aluminum cards:
- 1 mm thick
- These I have bought. They're legit: good weight, wears well, though a little thicker than a credit card
- $19.59 for 15 — about $1.31 per card
Software
- Laser setup: xTool Creative Space (XCS)
- Image generation (optional): getimg.ai — or whatever generator you like
Making the graphic
Already have a graphic? Skip to the XCS setup below. I can't draw, so I generated mine with Stable Diffusion on getimg.ai. Not sponsored, not affiliated — it's just what I use.
How I generate the art (click to expand)
- Log into your generator of choice and open the generation page.
- Describe what you want an image of. Here's the prompt I landed on after about a dozen refinements:
Change whatever you want in there — it's your card.
Mode: Text to Image
Generation type: SD (Stable Diffusion)
Prompt: digital illustration logo with ((many geometric details that appear the longer you look at the card)) featuring "Man Card!" in 8-bit pixel text, surrounded by interlocking low-poly geometric shapes in sharp grey, black, and white, very detailed and intricate design angular lines forming abstract high-impact suit pattern, faceted 3D-like relief, minimal background, retro pixel art with clean hard edges, 8K sharp details.
- Generate and iterate until you're happy with the result. For me that typically means about 100 images per design I actually keep.
- Upscale, then download. Upscaling before use sharpens the details and makes manipulations like tracing come out cleaner. In getimg.ai: hover over the image, click the three dots that come up, pick "Upscale 4x", then download the result (format doesn't matter). If your tool can't upscale, just download — it'll still work.
Step outcome: an image in your downloads folder that you want on a card.
The five designs
Here are the five graphics I generated. Right-click and copy any of them straight into XCS:
xTool Creative Space setup
I set up two cards in XCS — one black, one blue. Both use the same trick: a two-layer design where both layers are the exact same image, run blue light first and IR second.
Black card:
- Two-layer design, both layers the same image
- Top layer: blue light, xTool's reference settings for the material
- Bottom layer: the same settings, but IR
- Set processing to run by layer, top to bottom, so the blue light finishes before the IR starts
Blue card:
- Two-layer design, both layers the same image
- Top layer: blue light — use more power than the xTool reference here; the reference power wasn't enough on this card
- Bottom layer: IR
- Same rule: process by layer, top to bottom, blue light before IR
Yes, the screenshots show my shark logo — they're from my own business-card run. Same two-layer setup, different art.
Settings
The F1 has a 10 W blue laser and a 2 W IR laser. These are the settings that worked on these cards:
Black card
- Layer 1, blue light: dot duration 160 µs, power 30%, 280 DPI, 1 pass, bitmap mode Jarvis, bi-directional engraving
- Layer 2, IR: dot duration 300 µs, power 85%, 350 DPI, 1 pass, Jarvis, bi-directional
Blue card
- Layer 1, blue light: dot duration 200 µs, power 90%, 650 DPI, 1 pass, Jarvis, bi-directional
- Layer 2, IR: dot duration 200 µs, power 100%, 650 DPI, 1 pass, Jarvis, bi-directional
No beauty shots of the finished cards, I'm afraid — I never photographed them before this site went into hibernation. The proof is in the settings.
Cost and time
| Item | Use | Cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Aluminum card | 2 (ea) | $0.32 |
| Total | $0.32 |
| Step | Time (min) |
|---|---|
| Design: card graphic (optional) | 20 |
| Engrave: black aluminum card | 2.5 |
| Engrave: blue aluminum card | 14.5 |
| Total | 37 |
Files
The original plan here was downloadable project files — free for personal use, a dollar in the tip jar for commercial use. Honest update: the files never made it off the shop computer, and this site is now a preserved passion project rather than an active one. You don't really need them, though. The five graphics above are right-click-copyable and the full laser settings are listed. If this saved you some trial and error, the donate button in the footer genuinely works.