I have a 10W Longer Ray 5 laser and am looking to cut heat transfer vinyl to apply to shirts. I am using Siser non-pvc CPSIA Certified material for safety and am looking for starting settings for a speed/power matrix test on the vinyl.. Can someone give me assistance in this regard? I’m told I need to keep the power low and the speed high. The Siser material is expensive and I’d like not to have to waste too much of it in the testing. Thank you in advance.
Hi @Ramman I don’t personally think that laser cutting is a good method for working with tshirt vinyl. Finding a setting that will cut through the transfer material but not the backing sheet is going to be very difficult indeed.
This sort of work is usually done with a knife plotter like a Cricut or a Cameo Silhouette or one of the many similar machines with less well known branding. A knife can have is length adjusted and the pressure adjusted. A laser beam can’t really have a depth setting.
Others may have found this possible and have settings but I’ve always found a knife plotter to be better. Especially if you’re doing this sort of work regularly.
Unfortunately there is no way around it. If you want some data that can be used on your machine, you have to test it on your machine. That is the way most people do it, and the alternative is that you throw away a lot more material because the values that you got from a friend - do not fit your laser, even if it is the same type of laser.
When you draw in LB your layout for several items at once, there will always be something left over, use these leftovers and make a pattern with small shapes that you test with different speeds and power.
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For a visible-light diode laser, the cutting results will depend on the material color:
- White / green / blue / violet will cut poorly (if at all), because those colors reflect most of the laser energy
- Black / red / orange / yellow may cut better, because they absorb more of the energy
As @bernd.dk points out, the results on your machine depend on the exact laser / power / speed / material, which means you must find them by experimenting on the material(s) you will use.
In contrast, vinyl (and non-PVC PU) greedily absorbs energy from a CO₂ laser:
That was done in Dot Mode, which is available only with the Ruida controllers generally found in CO₂ lasers.
I thought this forum group might be interested in the results to my original question. Using my Longer 5R 10w laser on Siser non-pvc CPSIA Certified “white” transfer material, the numbers I came out with after lots of experimenting are 850/40 for speed and power. Using those numbers the laser removes the transfer material while leaving the clear “vinyl” backing (not so clear anymore) and the transferable image intact. Then one just follows the standard iron on procedure to transfer the image to whatever. I hope this helps. I understand that each laser is slightly different, but these numbers should give a good starting point. I’ll be curious about other forum members experiences in this regard.
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