Thanks guys, I think this is all very good advice. I’m using the air pump coming with the laser as well as exhausting fan. And definitely, there’s a lot of smoke recently. I will buy another airpump and also I will look to replace the exhausting fan.
I will also check the vetical alignment of the laser and will give you an update asap.
Thanks again. Peter
How many l/h or cbm/h should the exhausting fan have ?
Friends, with 100Watt it must also be possible to cut 4mm exterior plywood of a poor quality - without air even.
I cut 4mm “normal” BB plywood with a PC fan on my K40!
There is something wrong with the laser or the settings.
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I would think 100w would cut 10mm plywood in one pass less than 100% power. Speed maybe 20mm/s.
I’ve cut 6mm with 2 passes on my 40w. Air assist helpful but not mandatory.
I would suspect mirror alignment problems and maybe focus.
Yes I also thought this should not be any issue with 100W. But laser path / mirrors are ok. I have set this up in the beginning when nothing was cut, even 3mm plywood. Checked again yesterday but all pulse in the middle.
Btw, I have even cut 19mm pine wood, with focus 8mm into. The problem is that it happens to fail somewhere and always somewhere else. I have used so many settings, the last one was
25 mm/s, max.80%m, min. 70%
So, I have tested with a new 8bar air pump, but it was not that big difference in terms of smoke.
The first panel has cut good, just one little edge to be post-cut. And I thought, hey…
Then I tried the rest border of the panel to cut with the same and different parameter, as I had flames coming out always (I had this also last time).
So, even the parameter I used with the inner panel which was good, it didn’t go well this time. Here are some pictures from the backside:
So this didn’t cut the bar to end, but the squares were good:
Changing the parameters to 30mm/s / 70%max / 60%min was not good
Going back to the original parameters, still the same:
I checked the vertical alignment and it’s fine, I did focus, -10mm, -30mm, -50mm, laser is not moving:
Regards
Peter
I don’t know why I get flames now, which I didn’t get in the past…
Peter,
Check your min setting just in case it is too low and I would think too little air would lead to flames.
8 bar air pump? That’s 130psi. You should be getting such a high velocity stream of air through the nozzle that no flames could possibly survive.
Can you show what kind of pump you’re actually using and what your nozzle looks like?
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It’seven 11bar, but I guess this is only for tires. This pump has also another tube connector which I used, but that was not with too much pressure. As I said, it was not a big differnece to the original one:
Will bring this one back to the store, it’s also noisy like an airplane. I can’t find an electric compressor with 30-40 psi on the tube, the highest one was 2.2 psi and most of the items are 12V for car battery.
The manual says:
and
From the symptoms, the latter would describe it best, but I’m using a CW 3000 Chiller (with AntiFreeze, as it came in winter) and that seems ok.
CW3000 is not really suitable for a 100W I would think
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100w Should cut through 10mm ply without air assist.
What speed did you say you were running?
Is it possible your 100w is not 100w?
Do you have an ammeter?
There is something missing here…
Now what I did today:
- Cleaned everything
- Set up the whole Laserpath from scratch
- Cleaned Mirrors and Lens, inserted the lens again with flat side shows to the wood
Now the laser doesn’t focus anymore… I changed the lens sides back and forth, but the same result:
No idea what happened…
When I suggested it may not be 100w, the thought is, that it is not putting out 100w. for whatever reason.
Ah ok, and what could be the reasons for the 100W not getting out ?
But I think, my focus lens problem is now my main one…
- Early tube failure.
- Poor connection/s between tube and poor supply.
- Power supply issues
- Grounding issues.
2 items: Do a ramp test to get your focal length( google " laser ramp test" ).
Next, there were a few people with chinese laser cutters in these LightBurn forums which ended up with the laser power supply wired up incorrectly so it was not being PWM power control.
Good idea Doug.
But first I have to solve my new problem with the not focused laser beam. As you can see, this dioesn’t look very nice:
Maybe the lens is wrong sided ? I put it flat side down (to the wood) and tried the other way also, same problem. Maybe trashed ? But it looks ok, no scratches or so.