Engraving on ACM

Hi! My partner and I recently got the Ortur Laster Master 2 (15w laser) and have been playing around with it. We are going to use it to engraving on the back of our ACM art panels. I feel like I got most of it figured out, but there is an issue with alignment. It seems one letter or number will be out of line compared to the rest.
In the image I attached, the logo is done at 3000/80% where the bottom text is done 2000/100%
I usually hit the Start button and don’t touch it until its through, so I’m not moving it any. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

That looks like you have ‘Flood Fill’ enabled. You shouldn’t. :slight_smile:
It’s extremely sensitive to machine tuning - if your belt tension or repeatability is even slightly off, it will produce gaps.

You are much better off using ‘Fast Whitespace’ (in Edit > Device Settings) with a reasonable scanning speed, like 3000 to 4500 for the whitespace speed, then using ‘Fill shapes individually’ to reduce the overall amount of whitespace traversal.

okay thank you! im going to do a run with those settings and see how it comes out. is it possible to engrave on metal surfaces, ie. aluminum?
thanks for the quick reply :slight_smile:

That will depend. Engraving directly into “metal surfaces” with your low-power diode is not possible, but you can remove metal coatings such as paint and anodizing to get a similar look. You can also adhere a coating to the metal using heat from the laser to bond a paint-like substance to the surface as well. Blasting and engraving directly into a metal surface would require a more powerful setup.

holy cow thanks for the quick replies! okay thats what i figured. if i upgraded to 20w would that be powerful enough?

I would suggest there are more issues you may want to fully understand about the requirements for metal engraving and the product choices available in the market.

Most metal engraving, where you are removing material to leave the engraving marks, use fiber laser technologies. Without fully understand your goals, budget and willingness to research and learn new technologies, it is not an easy question to provide a simple Yes or No answer.

That’s fair to say. Right now we are not trying to go big, just explore options. We just want to laser engrave our logo and a few words below it. Our regular ACM we use, like you said, can not really be engraved on, but the other style of ACM has a coating on it where we can “blast off” the coating, like what is in the picture.

Oz, I tried the setting recommendations and it still bumps it off center randomly. I’m guessing maybe something to do with the belts as you said?

Thank you again for replies

It’ll be something mechanical, like belts being either loose or too tight (binding), a loose wheel or motor pinion, or something like that. It could also be acceleration too high.