I recently cleaned and aligned my OmTech 80W laser because it wasn’t cutting as well on the left side as the right side. Now it’s cutting HOT. I run it at 10% power and the score lines are DARK. That’s with a 350 speed. When I remove cut items from my laser even they are hot to touch. The backs are charred.
I don’t know what other settings to change or why it’s all of a sudden doing this. Any suggestions? I have seen some comments about s-vaule but I cannot find that setting on my lightburn.
If the units were (inadvertently) changed from mm/s to mm/min, it would be running at 1/60 the usual speed and cooking the material.
Check the Machine Units setting:
Or, perhaps, you did a really good job of cleaning & aligning, so the machine is now working the way it should! 
Fortunately, that doesn’t apply to Ruida controllers on CO₂ machine.
Did it look like 350mm/s? I’d hope you could visibly tell the difference between 350mm/s and 6mm/s?
The Ruida has internal values set for minimum and maximum settings. You can access them Edit → Device Settings. You have to expand the vendor settings. Unless you’ve been in there, it’s likely ok.
It sounds more like you had some kind of hardware failure. Running hot, really doesn’t tell me anything useful in this context. A percentage with the associated mA would mean a great deal more.
Do you have a mA meter?
Can you post the values?
Do you have a voltmeter and/or a watt meter?
Check the digital MA meter and see if it’s working. If it’s not, unplug the connecter (ethernet) and plug it back in. I find that my 100w will burn at 100% if the digital meter is off.
Thank you! I did check and it’s still at mm/sec. I guess it could just be running that much better but i’ve had it almost 3 years and it’s never burned this dark at 10% power.
Hot means it’s burning darker than it should at 10% power. Or darker than it ever has I should say. I do have a multimeter although I don’t know how to test that…
Is your machine or laser power supply (lps) have a mA meter?
It shows 4ma when it’s firing at the 10%.
Yes it shows 4ma.
That sounds good, so you not running hot… maybe as @ednisley advised, it finally running correctly.
It’s not going to generate 80W at 4mA, so it’s clearly not running a lot of current.
Without some kind of idea and photo it’s difficult for us to tell. Is it properly focused? This could be a reason for a fat line, looking darker.
Is this a vector or image (scan)? If it’s a vector, are you sure it’s got room to get to 350mm/s?
It’s a file I desgined in Lightburn and have cut at least 100 times. I will post a picture. It does look “okay” but it’s darker than I like. It creates more “char” on the back of the wood which I don’t like. It just seemed like it was burning SO much darker.
Don’t know what to tell you, we rely on you to tell us what it’s doing and other diagnostic information.
I can see where it’s reflecting from the honeycomb.
I assume I’ve oriented it correctly as there is no clear left and right, top and bottom maybe…
I’d suggest you double check your focus. Looks like marks from your honeycomb, but as if they were out of focus… Focus looks good on the top.
How this is this stuff? Is it regular plywood?
1/8" Birch plywood.
An 80 W CO₂ laser tube won’t fire at much below 10% of its rated current, so I’d say you now have a machine working the way it should and much better than it used to.
With that in mind, if those logos are Line engraved, rather than Fill engraved, then the laser head moves at much less than 350 mm/s around the characters, so a small change in beam power will produce a disproportionate increase in charred wood.
Because the tube won’t fire at much less than 10% and increasing the nominal layer speed won’t change the actual speed, the resulting burn may be as light as it can get. However, if you can apply a small Offset to the shapes and use a Fill layer, then the head will move at the nominal layer speed (back-and-forth across the design) and give you much more headroom to change both power and speed.
As @jkwilborn points out, those scorch marks on the back come from cutting directly on the honeycomb. Raising the wood a few millimeters will get rid of most of that, at the cost of somehow preventing the pieces from falling through and getting torched by a nearby cut.
Fire The Laser!
