Recommendations for a “faster” laser

Community Laser Talk
1

Hello everyone, I currently have two “Chinese”CO2 lasers, one 100W and one 60W that I use for my business. Currently with the lenses I have the 100w is used primarily for engraving and the 60w for cutting. The biggest issue I have is how long things take to make. The machines themselves have an x-axis speed of 800mm/s (60w) and 1200mm/s (100w). However with the transversing of the laser, I am only really able to run 200-400mm/s without increasing time dramatically due to swing. With this, I am looking for possible recommendations on how to make my lasers movement more usable at higher speeds. Is it possible to by new stepper motors or other components to help? Or do I need to really start looking into a industrial/commercial grade system? Or am I just expecting too much?

Any feedback/recommendations are appreciated

2

Interested on what you are engraving…

It’s always been the more powerful machine is used in cutting and the least for engraving?

Few of these machines will do 1200mm/s, what kind are you running that will run this fast?

With easy numbers… 1000mm/s you cover 1mm in 1mS… these lps placard lists the response time of the lps is <=1mS… we are lucky if they respond that quick… it’s hard to measure, but we know from the industry what’s going on…

At 1000mm/s the best dpi possible, if everything is at spec, is 25.4 dpi or a single dot/mm and I doubt you could control it at 1000mm/s let alone 1200mm/s speed…

What I’m saying is you can’t really make it go faster, as you are probably there or past it already… The only thing faster is an RF excited co2 laser…

Your best bet to lower the overall time without affecting other things is to reduce the mass of the head and associated parts that have to move. This will allow an increase of acceleration values that will reduce the overscan.

When the Ruida scans, it will use the overscan area to decelerate the head, change it’s direction and get back up to speed outside the engraving area to allow it to engrave at the specified speed.

I think that’s what you mean by swing…?

I went from about 800g head assembly, not including the drag chain, to just at 100g. Mine will run 1650mm/s without a problem… however it’s only useful for academic purposes at those speeds…

The payoff is in the overscan reduction… here is a 40000mm/s, left, compared to a 6000mm/s acceleration … the preview will allow you to see the overscan if you select show transversal moves.

Notice the time difference…

6k-40k-acceleration
6k-40k-acceleration1229×932 291 KB

This is close to how the machine was received and how it looks recently… or a before and after… :rofl:

original-current-20220614
original-current-202206142991×1005 556 KB

The head is very simple, easy to align and has an adjustable along the Z axes…

cropped-head
cropped-head1920×2880 297 KB

Could be, if you can get around the physics, you could benefit the world :rofl:

You didn’t mention what you were doing, which may change what we’d advise…

Hope this makes sense…

Good luck…

:smile_cat:

3

We engrave/cut a lot of curved surfaces.

I would tend to agree with you, however, our 100w machine isn’t very efficient at cutting. It has a tendency to char the edges of the materials, even at low power levels and multiple passes. I have always attributed this to having a longer focal length then on our 60w. I have spent countless hours adjusting, readjusting to see if I could improve on the cutting on the 100w machine, but I havent found the magic bullet as of yet. I was looking into swapping the head to allow for different lens options, but havent gotten there yet.

its and older “china” branded laser. It might move at 1200mm/s but I woudlnt say its productive or useful at that speed.

Yes I am talking about scan when I use the term swing. The swing is by far the most time consuming of any project we run. That is what I am trying to reduce while increasing overall production speeds.

4

I can tell you from experience that the 100W should do better than the 60W…

  1. working tube
  2. clean and aligned optics
  3. proper focus…

If you have these, it should work properly… If you have issues with charring or burning, it’s either not the right power and speed combination or one of the three items I mentioned isn’t right.

With any machining operation, what they term as speeds and feeds are very critical. All machines can do the job … it will do the best possible job with the least wear and most efficient operation at certain speeds (power) and feeds. These have to be found… each machine is different, unlike most spindle type machines where you can compute the proper speeds and feeds.

Don’t know what else to suggest…

Sing out if there is anything else I can be opinionated about :face_with_spiral_eyes: …

Good luck

:smile_cat: