Well, my struggles continue. I’m going along my happy way engraving anodized bottle openers for a customer. I hear what sounds like someone pitching a small stone at my window near the laser.
I look over and notice I’m not engraving anymore. The head is moving, but I’m not seeing that bright light like I was earlier. I shut the machine off, and turned it back on, and it’s barely making a mark on these now.
I did visually check with a flashlight, that all my mirrors are not cracked from what I can see as well. It will engrave soft piece of pine that I put in there.
My settings are 200mm / 65 power
Link shows good/bad. I have “another” tech support ticket with Monport.
Already did that. No water leaking anywhere. The tube has around 2 hours on it.
I put some tape on mirror one, and she fired through it, just to make sure something hadn’t moved.
Get this. For giggles I did another tape test. So-so results.
I throw in a bottle opener into my check, and that sucker lit up.
It’s like it got a hit of adrenaline. Before when I was running these, I could just reach down and pick the piece up. It was warm to the touch but not hot.
This ONE? It almost burned my fingers.
I’m looking for a good diod laser right now. I have tumblers and keychains to produce, and I can’t rely it seems on this machine. Yes some of my problems are self inflicting, but not this time. I was just running the job, when it all went south.
I’m done for the day. I need to eat supper, and take a shower, and regroup.
Sounds like it’s intermittently failing. I would tend to think that sounds more like an LPS issue but not certain.
I’m largely done with laser recommendations. This will largely depend on what your priorities are. I’m generally negative on xTool due to the number of xTool specific issues they have in firmware and spotty support.
OK, Didn’t know that you previously gave out recommendations. That’s ok.
Let me ask this. I put a piece of tape on the 1st mirror to see if it would burn there. It did. Not much though to be honest. Max Power was set at 12% from the control panel, then I pressed Pulse.
Just after that I laid one of my keychains on the bed. Fired off the job, and noticed what I will call “Purple Plasma Flare” bouncing around a 1" chrome piece in the tube that is located at the end of the tube.
If you go here, and use the magnifying glass and navigate to the end you’ll see what I’m talking about.
I obviously don’t run the laser with the back lid open, but I had it off doing the tape test, so I saw it. I ran the job again, and saw it again. Normal ?
I stumbled across this vid last night and at marker 1:12 you can see the laser running down the tube, but at the Cathode end, it’s clean. Meaning no purple flare like I’m seeing on mine.
One more thing. Is it hard on a power supply to put a small piece down. Laser it, open the lid and remove it, and place another one down and run another job all within 30 seconds or so, and repeat that process over and over?
I know it’s not ideal. My plan was to make a jig to hold 5 pieces or so, and burn them all at once. But when I got started I just kept going. Thoughts on running repetitive jobs quickly in a small time frame?
Can you confirm you’re using distilled water for cooling?
I’m not aware of the typical expected duty cycle for these LPSs. I’m sure there’s variance in robustness based on manufacturer and intended application but there are plenty of these style of lasers running jobs all day long. From what I’ve seen on K40 style lasers is LPSs are basically considered consumables and will die at regular levels of usage. I haven’t seen anything that lays out what causes their death whether it be a particular condition (e.g. heat) or manner of use.
I’d expect that for two scenarios where total duration is the same that the continuous duty scenario would be harder on the LPS than repeated cycles of usage. I’m only speculating, though. I have not seen anything specific demonstrating that.
Yeah, that’s kind of close to what I was seeing. It wasn’t so much a line or crooked line, but like a purple “cloud” of charged particles if that makes any sense. It changed shape on every instance. And on some test “pulse’s” it had problems burning a hole through masking tape.
I’ll try to get a video of it this afternoon when I get home around lunchtime.
BTW, what is a LPS?
Yes, I’m using distilled water. Actually replaced all of the older distilled water a day before.
Laser Power Supply. This describes the high voltage power supply used to fire the tube. This is in contrast to other potential power supplies in the laser such as those used to supply power to controller or stepper motors.
K40 style lasers typically use the LPS to also provide power to controller and stepper motors as there are connectors for 5V and 24V power. Larger machines separate out this duty.
Hard to tell purely from your description but you would generally get a very clear cohesive line of light. You should not be getting any drifting or flaring.
I’m wondering if the water swap yesterday was purely coincidence in timing or if perhaps there were some impurities potentially introduced at the same time. Are you running straight distilled water or have you added anything to it?
If you have a meter you could check the resistance.
I’m not super familiar with tube vs LPS failure conditions but I’ve heard others describe similar situations as being caused by loss of gases in the tube.
