Hi guys,
it’s my first post here on LB so let me say hello first.
I’m preparing an order in China for fiber laser marking/engraving machine. Almost done. It will be MOPA M7 100 W E2 source from JPT. Now the lenses: quartz material and i decided to take 4 lenses. My current pick is F100, F210, F290 and F420. What you think about this set? I’m buying this laser for general experiments, playing around in home workshop, marking my tools, doing some deep engraving, occasional metal cutting and who knows what else? That is why i’m thinking about the shortest possible lens for 60x60 mm are and the biggest one for 300x300 mm area, plus some lenses in between. Is it sensible approach? Thanks for any inputs.
I have a 300x300mm FL420, a 175x175mm FL254, and a 70x70mm FL100. That set seems like a decent spread for me (although the middle one could go a bit either way – it just came with the machine as a default).
The FL100 is plenty tight to pack a punch on small parts (e.g. coin blanks).
The FL420 is plenty wide to handle the big stuff like square-foot tiles, and with enough depth of focus to handle the compound curves of Contigo travel mugs in a rotary.
Most of the time, however, I’m just using the FL254, as it’s in the goldilocks zone. It’s got enough depth of field to play with natural items like rocks. It’s got enough usable area to handle most things I tend to work on. And it’s tight enough to pack a decent punch.
If you’re doing serial production of large numbers, having the smallest lens that covers your use case may be able to shave enough time off each job to add up over many runs. For general experimentation, on the other hand, having one less lens makes me happy. If I’m doing something that needs my short punchy lens or my wide reachy lens, I go for the appropriate lens. For everything else, I have one less variable to deal with: power, speed, interval, frequency, pulse length, but not which lens to choose.
Welcome, and I’m jealous.
Agree with above, i started with 100x100, 175x175 (254), 300x300 (420) The 100x100 barely covers a business card, the 175x175 is the goto, and the 300x300 is good for coloring stainless. This is with a 60W. With your 100W not sure you would need anything smaller then 100x100.
Make sure to get the 800mm tower option.
Thank you for inputs. Really appreciate it. So i will take every second lens in the list to cover whatever i will need: F100, F210, F290 and F420. Yes, 800mm pillar is there already, together with stepper motor&driver. Can’t wait to start experiments!
Tall towers are nice. I didn’t have a tall enough tower to get my F420 high enough for the rotary, so I picked up some stand offs/risers from Silent Mfg (the 100mm ones being all I needed).
Of course, then I ended up wanting to secure the rotary off the end of the bed plate, so I also got a rotary extension fixture plate, which let mount the rotary where the center of engraving is right at bed center.
Natually, I also ended up with multiple rotaries for my lasers, and rather than constantly plugging and replugging, I got a nice 4PDT switch and some connectors and made a selector for my fiber laser rotary setups (which should only be toggled with the power off)… and then I did the same thing on my CO2 laser so I can select its rotary without plugging and unplugging the Y axis.
I’m currently on an “I don’t need more hardware” run with the lasers – which just means I’m gathering all sorts of materials to play with. Landscaping rocks are rather fun, and I just engraved a toaster. Today I picked up an entire bag’s worth of invasive apple snail shells off the bank of a local pond so I can play around more with them. (The test I did some time ago didn’t actually engrave into the shell surface, instead just vitrifying and bleaching the lased area. I want to play with that some more.)
