I have been considering removing the honey comb on my Monport 130w
bed size 1300 x 900 and trying to do some cutting acrylic and wood mostly…
While the honey comb leaves small spark marks I believe the knife blade will as well !
But Before I go to that exercise, I’d like to ask what kind of success . OR not !
the folks have had doing this style of cutting.
I know I can raise the material off the honey comb with punk spikes, been there done that,
It is a hassle getting them set up etc..
I prefer to throw in down and cut, as I do alot…
Hate the idea of the parts falling thru to the bottom … but…
so any thoughts are appreciated…
Ed love the fixture also… and the fact, (that I had forgot about) scorching of fallin’ part
is not acceptable..
so I will not even consider the knife edge cutting now…
Thanks for the reminder on that fact !
Ed as a side note, I noticed your Red dot was very bright… Mine was also
so I put a simple 100Ohm pot inline with the 5v drive voltage
and then I can turn it down to a mear twilight pin point… it helps get a little closer to the
cut point… IF that is needed…
The laser module sits in a 3D printed mount that simplifies fine adjustments. After I got the thing tweaked to overlay the dot on the laser hole, it stays pretty much dead on.
Yeah, I need to work on how to do this. I have a blowback issue on items where I paint the wood first. Isopropyl does not get it all and obviously adds time. Maybe I can use some of the 1.7mm thick gazillion tongue depressors I have for shims. I can see some experimenting coming my way!
I tried using the honeycomb that came with my OMTech 50W machine.
One of the issues was it’s construction was aluminum, so magnets wouldn’t work. I removed it and it sat on triangular bars to support the honeycomb. I removed those and measured the hole.
The local steel place cut one to fit and cost me $12 USD. I put it in the machine and used the laser to mark drill/locating holes for jigs. I do mostly engraving but I do cut, I stick 5x20x2mm magnets to lift it up 5mm. You need to allow the gasses to get out.
On mine the gases and debris go down then hit the metal plate, a lot of the saps/oils stick to the plate and the other goes out the back. These are cut out of 5mm sub flooring, so lifting it 5mm is on the edge.
I finally lost track of where the honeycomb is, couldn’t find a good use for it. I cut paper targets out of watercolor paper that I just put on the plate. I use magnets to help hold the paper as I do use a very low pressure air assist for paper.
One of the best things it did was get airflow through the machine working as expected. I also had to open the hood around a half inch.
This is my original machine as far as ventilation fan and aquarium pump, only the head and drive/belts have been changed out, 11mm/s@45%, a 43W tube.
I think most of us are happy if we get it to do what we want.
No, how I can float my ply 1mm above the honeycomb to prevent blowback. Was never an issue until now. I may be getting some commercial business where it matters.
Thanks for the writeup on yours. It was very interesting. My honeycomb is steel for the 40w machine, but I had some success with the tongue depressors.
Yes, I know about fixtures. @thelmuth did a video of my fixture system for the Sculpfun iCube laser. My concern is how to manage a support system that is not included in the cutting path.
Welcome to the boat, good thing it’s pretty big to hold all of us.
Got my crack in, we all struggle with a system that can change, but you have to physically move the supports.
If you have an led you might be able to pick out a spot for them. It gets more difficult when the material isn’t really stiff so you need to support it by something along it’s edges.
If it’s too flimsy to stand on it’s own, you have to support it somewhere. Probably not too bad figuring out where to put them for a production run, but when the artwork changes you’re back in the boat again.
Registering this stuff across platforms, such as grbl to drill holes and the fiber to remove the copper… Some way you have to synchronize the registration between the two…
If you figure it out, you can advise the rest of us. Good luck.
Another thing you can do it focus so the depth of field (dof) of your lens starts to diverge at the exit point of the material.
I commonly cut 5mm sub flooring with a 2" lens, it only has about 2.7mm dof, but I can’t see it diverge on the device even though I know it goes out of focus… after the 2.7mm. I focus
I use this calculator for a ballpark estimate, the closer the data is to reality, the closer the results.
I haven’t found any kind of calculator to figure out divergence after it leaves the lens.
Also keep in mind that acrylic is not cut, it melts. Severely acute angles will droop during “cutting,” making the finished piece useless. Honeycomb reduces this, but not eliminated.
