I have a moon flower that i am trying to cut but it seems to not cut right through in some spots and burns the wood in others or cuts out thin and breaks in some spots. I am using it on 500/80% with 30 passes. What could i be doing wrong
Doing 30 passes?
Looks like a lot more than people usually do, rarely more than 5 passes.
500 what? mm/min? mm/s? inch/min? Etc.
Beside, plywood is not as uniform as it looks, because of the glue layers between each wood layer: sometime laser goes though directly, sometime it cuts half of the thickness.
Oh, and you might want to check the focus, sometime it is simple things like that. 
General advice is to focus on half of the thickness, too.
i think it is inches /min. i am no good with measuring in mm so i have to have it inches lol how do i check the focus
It depends on the laser, they should have instructions on how to do that.
On my Creality laser, they provide a little metallic device to put on the surface of the material to cut / engrave. I lower the laser head until the orange protection touches the device.
On other lasers, it can be a foot attached to the laser, that rotates toward the material, same principle.
S9 is a 5 watt laser, I believe. 1/4" is asking a LOT of that little laser. That’s WAAY outside my experience. I would never ask my 5W laser to cut more than about half that thickness.
Depending on the plywood, you may never get it to cut. Some plywoods use very tough glue that difficult to cut even with 10x the power you have.
Oh, I am still not used to these imperial units…
Yes, 6 mm of plywood is very thick, I understand better the number of passes.
I already have some trouble to cut 3 mm with a 10 W diode laser… 2 mm is OK in one pass, although sometime it doesn’t cut all the way in, so I have to finish with a knife…
Another problem is focus: you focus on the surface, but after 2-3 mm, the laser is out of focus. That’s why going some mm lower than nominal focus is common practice (my Creality focus device has steps to take this in account).
Plus the more passes you do, the more soot and charred wood is in the cut trenches, making it harder to finish, and can even make a fire hazard.
And I hope you have air assist, otherwise it is even worse.
Actually my s9 is a 90 watt
Per the Amazon description: “S9 uses the latest 5.5W laser beam”. No matter what they say about “laser beam shaping technology”, it’s basically a 5 W laser. That’s not a bad thing, but it does set the outer limits on what’s possible.
Run a few Material Tests on whatever wood you’re using to get an idea of how the machine behaves.
That will provide better information than any settings anybody else uses with any other laser.
Some laser makers advertise the input wattage, ie. the power they consume from the outlet, including the power to run electronics, motors, laser, etc.
What we usually talk about is the laser output, usually 5 W, 10 W, 20 W, 40 W for diode lasers. Base diode outputs 5 W, other values are made by combining several diodes with mirrors.
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