Sorry if it’s not totally clear in the subject. I have a Neje 2S Max 40W diode laser machine, which needs sometimes a lot of passes to cut thru plywood. Depending on the wood provider, it can take up to 8 or 10 passes or more.
Issue is when I have to cut small holes (like 5mm diameter) in my design, doing 8 passes on each hole will overburn the wood because it doesn’t have time to cool down between passes.
If I have a small design, I would need to set a pause between passes in order to let the wood cool down. If I have a large design, it would be more time efficient to have the laser perform the whole pass for the whole design before starting the second pass, instead of doing all passes of each shape.
It’s a real pain to do the passes manually, waiting between restarts. I don’t let the laser machine alone when it cuts, but I’m preparing other designs while it cuts and it’s time consuming to manualy manage the passes of each layer because of this cooldown time that is needed.
I’m pretty sure everybody with diode machines do experience the same type of issue !
Not sure if that machine comes with air assist. If it does make sure it’s on to reduce char. If it doesn’t you may want to look to see if there is a kit for the tip of your laser to add it. Many times you can find these on ebay/amazon. Air assist can cut down drastically on the char and the amount of passes and is always well worth the investment.
Now onto your question. If it doesn’t have air assist and your trying to pause after a few passes to cut down on char and then restart after a short pause you could do this little work around. You could layer the job (with the colored block selection at the bottom of Lightburn.
Let’s say you want to do 4 passes, pause, and then 4 more passes. You could do something like this - duplicate your image 3 times (right click the image and click duplicate twice). This leave you with 3 of the exact same images. Assign each one of these duplicates a different color (using the color blocks at the bottom of lightburn). This will give you 3 different colors (aka layers). Now you can tweak the settings for each layer.
1.) Now that your job is separated into 3 layers (colors) - Make sure each layer has its own individual color from the color block selection at the bottom of light burn and make sure your images are all lined back up on top of each other.
2.) Now its time to assign settings to each of the the three layers. Click on the first layer settings and assign 4 passes to it using your normal speed/power settings.
3.) This layer is going to act as your “PAUSE” Click on the second layer make it so your doing a few really slow passes at 1% power or less. These slow passes will act as your “pause” so adjust the speed to mimic how long of a pause that you want. For this second layer turn the laser power all the way down to 1% or below (so it doesn’t make any cuts/marks on your wood). The laser head will still move around like it’s cutting but with no considerable cutting/marking power. This will allow your wood to cool like you wanted
4.) Click on the third layer settings and assign 4 passes to it using your normal speed/power settings.
You can tweak the passes and layer above but this could work in your situation as long as you don’t mind your laser moving around with little-to-no power (under 1%power) during your “pause” layer (which is the second layer in the instructions).
There might be a better way to do this but this could work.
Thanks for your answers, these can be workarounds for some cases, but it is a real pain to implement on each cut job … Also, 4 passes may be too much for cutting small holes like 5mm diameter holes in plywood.
This feature would be very simple to implement, I don’t understand why we don’t have such option natively …