Lightburn Software bug?

we have a cloudray 50W JPT fiber laser. It is a fantastic tool but we have many small challenges. The intended use is for creating watch faces in 0.5mm brass. I have spent a full weekend calibrating, and following all instructions carefully. Saturday I had great success engraving to 0.25mm depth with these settings.
1200 mm/sec
80 power
25 frequency
.0100, no crosshatching
we set it at 66 degrees and to autorotate, (we are creating round watch faces and this is to secure we don’t get any stepping in the cutting)

we did 12 passes, then a clean up pass
1500 mm/sec
10 power
20 Frequency
.0250 cross hatch
45 degrees
4 passes.

then we repeat.
worked perfectly and the parts came out super clean…


yesterday we used the same settings and after the first round the laser had burned thru.


after burning thru.

We updated the settings
1600 mm/sec
40 power
25 Khz
.0250 no cross hatch
123 degrees - auto rotate
3 passes

then a very similar clean up
this worked great

is there something we ae doing incorrectly we are certain that the settings we are using are not incorrect from what I have wrote but we get extremely differing results on different days.

this is of course a very big challenge as we have been struggling for weeks with this and have generally felt that it was the LightBurn software, I am at a loss so we are looking for some help?

Deep etching is difficult in it’s own right - doing color etching with a MOPA for instance, even the ambient temperature and hardware temperature can skew results - producing different colours.

Could you attach some photos of a good result, as well as the bad result, so we can get an idea of how big the variation is?

How reliable is your focus and fixturing? Are you using an air assist to blow away the ablated brass?

I am surprised that engraving to a depth of 0.25mm is considered deep. We are trying to accomplish in 12/24 passes.

Here as you requested is a test I did, worked perfect, was very excited to use this profile for the final part, the next diy I could not achieve the same results.

The part burned thru in 12 passes.

image

We have a HEPA evacuation system, focus is spot on we use a 110 mm lens which has a 3mm depth of field

Any thoughts would be appreciated

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