What CNC laser for label engraving/printing?

[sacentre]

Dear All
I hope I've got the right forum for this question. Can anyone recommend a suitable desktop CNC laser engraver for engraving equipment labels? I know nothing about these products or how to use them so I'm starting right at the beginning here.

Intended application
I often construct electronic projects and house them in metal or plastic project boxes but short of paying for commercial silk-screen printing, I have no way of producing a nice, professional looking label I can stick on the front panel with legends for the lights, switches and controls - ON/OFF, RPM, Power, Fuse, DC In etc.

In the past, I've printed labels on paper using a laser jet printer and then covered the surface with a transparent self adhesive plastic laminate. Another method was to cut the label from thin aluminium or stainless then letter it with dry transfer lettering as used in silk-screen printing. I would then spray a clear varnish on the top. This method produces reasonable results but is fiddly and time consuming and isn't very durable.

What would be ideal is to be able to engrave the lettering on thin aluminium or plastic - maximum size around 4 x 6 inches.
I see tons of low cost laser engravers but have no idea which if any, would be suitable: - eg what laser power would be sufficient - 10w, 20, 40w etc?

If anyone has experience with these devices or alternatives to suggest for this application, I'd appreciate it.

TIA
Trevor

[beanflying]

Plastic and timber directly are easy and can be done with Diode or CO2 Lasers. Metals you can use 40W of CO2 and a marking compound like Laserbond or similar for this path. Or if you want to mark directly on metal then you are talking a Fiber Laser.

Recent thread here and some links https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/laser-marking-pcbs-whats-needed/msg3788606/#msg3788606

You might like to have a look at some of Russ's playing with Fiber Lasers here and after this and also a huge back catalogue of CO2 Laser playings.