but when I try to cut with the same settings get nowhere near the test cards, the only setting I can get to cut through is anything above 70% and 275mm/m
anything faster than that will not cut yet the material test suggests otherwise, can anyone shed some light on this
I’m assuming I have some setting wrong somewhere, below are the settings used
$0=10
$1=25
$2=0
$3=2
$4=0
$5=0
$6=0
$10=1
$11=0.010
$12=0.002
$13=0
$20=0
I often suggest to make the material test using 4-6 50mm squares instead of 5mm. The problem with the tiny squares is that the laser never gets up to full speed, so there is a lot more time to burn. I have not drilled into it, but I expect switching from constant power to variable might give different results.
When I do a cut test on a material I usually just do a 25-50mm circle with constant power… I also go much faster and use multiple passes.
I re-ran the material test on the exact same settings and found that the speed was not altering at all throughout the test.
I corrected the $30 parameter and ran a new test with 10mm squares, (was running out of ply) and the below looks closer in line with what I am achieving
I’m suspecting that is about right for a 10W laser although they do claim it can cut 8mm ply with 1 pass so was thinking there must be a way of pushing a bit more out of it using 3mm ply, getting greedy now lol, considering my last laser took 4 passes to achieve the same cuts
Yeah, they also claim they have the best laser. I saw a video where they cut 18mm ply in a single pass with my S30 Pro. I won’t do that to my machine!
Glad you are closer to getting the performance you expected.
As for using more passes, You may find it is faster to actually cur with 5 passes than 2. I cut 2.8mm ply with 800mm/m 80% pwr, and 5 passes, reliably. Experiment on some scrap wood.
I have tried the multiple passes both constant height and dropping into cut for next passes with various speeds and powers but can not achieve anything better than the single pass at 275mm/m 80% pwr, so happy to settle on that
I saw a video where they cut 18mm ply in a single pass with my S30 Pro. I won’t do that to my machine!