Hi All, I am very new to all of this so aware I am going to be asking some pretty basic questions. We have a laser cutter in school and I a design for a bug hotel which I want to cut out using birch plywood. I have tried several times to cut the required shapes, but I am currently having the following issues:
the laser doesn’t manage to cut through the wood. I have added 4mm on to the 11mm making the lengh up to 15mm, and even taken it up to 20mm
when the laser cuts I am now getting quite thick brown lines, which I assume is due to the power not being correct. We were handed a sheet of paper with recommend power and speeds for different materials. I have tried to tweak.
Any advice would be grateful as I am very aware that whatever needs changing is probably minor. I do not want to keep wasting wood either!
Do yourself a big favor and learn the basics of laser technology and your machine. A laser machine is a relatively dangerous machine to work with if you don’t know what you’re doing.
A more precise and detailed description of the problem, preferably with documentation in the form of pictures and screenshots of your settings in LightBurn, is always a good start. Without that, it’s guesswork for the rest of us.
No, it’s not, if you don’t have the basic understanding right, then it’s not minor.
Ok- to clarify we had department training in the summer and I take health and safety very seriously due to my job. We were not given a manual so I am relying on the bit of paper HPC gave us, online videos and I was hoping to use this forum rather than just reading posts. However, I can see this forum is not the right place for me. Thank you for your time- I will contact light burn directly and send pictures. BTW I was not next to the laser cutter when I wrote my first comment hence the lack of photos.
It doesn’t help you to feel offended, firstly because it’s not anyone’s intention, secondly because you need to go the RIGHT way and understand your machine AND LightBurn.
Find the necessary information and come back, we are here (also) for you
@bernd.dk is correct, and nobody intended any offense. We (the users) ask a lot of questions because we cannot see your machine or specific operation. You have to be our eyes and ears in the troubleshooting process. It would be exactly the same if direct contact with Lightburn is used.
Lightburn staff members monitor this Forum, so you have already contacted them. You will often see their postings where it is appropriate.
Please remember there are a gazillion machine versions out there, a gazillion projects, and a gazillion versions of how to do something (yeah, I may have exaggerated a bit). You will find people on this forum will go the extra mile to help you solve your problem. Please be patient and let us try to help you.
We were all beginners once and we all know what it’s like to not understand why things are going wrong until we understand how things work.
As a first attempt to help and guide you on the right path I would say that you will have to start by properly focusing the laser.
You will need to know where is your focus point.
Then the focus point should be located in the middle of the material thickness when cutting and at the face of the material when engraving.
I don’t know what type of laser it has, but I’ll leave an image taken from the internet just to show the basics of the laser beam.
