I didnt know if someone here could possibly help. I am having trouble with my Boss LS1630. I teach at a small college where I teach in an art department, we have had it for 8 years. We do lots of engraving on all sorts of materials especially wood veneer and paper. It has had the ability to engrave fabric (I had a student engrave an entire set of bed sheets.) But now it is running so hot. Even at 1% power and 30in/s it is burning deep. If I have it at 10% power and 20in/s it will burn out about 1/16 of an inch deep into cherry plywood. I tried running material tests 1% power and 5in/s it just started catching fire and burned through 1/4inch ply. I tried talking to Boss laser and they had not hit this problem before. When I burn an image it even burns the white space.
They said I might need to replace the lasers PCU but I wanted to check to see if it was an odd setting or situation in light burn since the latest upgrade. Any thoughts and suggestions would be helpful! Thank you. Processing: tempImageHxHW1n.jpg…Processing: tempImageTuFm3N.jpg…
One possibility is having the LightBurn speed units switched from inch/s to mm/s. The machine will be running 25.4× slower than you expect and toasting the material. You’d think such a speed difference would be obvious, but …
Does the machine have a millammeter to monitor the tube current? If so, it should never show more than maybe 25 mA and the current should scale roughly linearly with the LightBurn layer power percentage.
If that’s both constant and far too high, the high-voltage power supply is a goner.
I appreciate the quick response. I checked and it is all set to inches. I just tested it while keeping an eye on the mA meter. At 10 speed 5 power it is hitting 4mA but it is burning deeper than normal. So maybe it is the power supply. Do you know a good way to test it?
Thanks again
The tube current is not jammed at full throttle, which pretty much eliminates the power supply. If “5 power” means 5%, then I’m surprised the tube fires at all, but if that’s 50%, then the current seems low.
It is possible the tube has failed and is no longer resonating in TEM00 mode, which can cause all manner of peculiar problems, because the beam no longer focuses correctly.
This discussion goes over the details and explains how to do the tests:
Pictures of the results on a paper target will be revealing. It should be a nice round spot, not a hole through the paper, so we can examine the details.
Thanks for your feedback on this. I worked with Boss laser test support and it looks like my controller has malfunctioned or is started to. Even in the tests it started moving erratically. So we are starting there. Hopefully this week I can get it sorted. Thanks again. I will save the limit switches link for after I set it up and if this is not really the problem . Thanks