Snapmaker Ray 40W -- first attempt with Lightburn (and more or less the machine too)

[stripes (stripes@mac.com)]

I’m trying to get use to a new laser cutter and light burn. I tried 3mm thick MDF and the material test under “Laser Tools”…oh, and I imported the settings file from one of the other forums on here.

The laser moved around for a bit and finally started doing some lazing, and after a minute or so the machine beeped loudly and gave me the flash code for the burn or fire detection system and light burn could move the laser head but not power it up again until I power cycled the device. The result on the MDF looks out of focus, and like it hadn’t burned through:

I slid the focus lug on the Ray to the other extreme and got a similar looking result.

So I tried making a square at 100mm/sec and 20% power and it did one edge and the burn detector went off. I tried a circle at 6000mm/60% power and it got more or less one go around before the burn sensor went off and I had to power cycle again. I tried a hexagon at 300mm/35% and no dice there either.

It is harder to see what is up for this second set, but:

I don’t know if the machine is broken, or if I’m too heavy handed on the power or if I found a sheet of MDF that hates diode lasers (it is actually an off cut from my 20W CO2 laser, but that machine has a lot of other issues so I was hoping this snapmaker would work well for me,…)

Does anyone have any ideas on experiments I can try? Or if anyone has a similar machine what settings do you use for 3mm thick MDF?

Maybe MDF is a bad choice of material? Is there a better option for thin low cost burns? (I’m mostly making box inserts for boardgames and minis…although I was hoping with the advertised ability to cut up to 15mm thick wood on the Ray that I might cut exterior boxes as well for some projects)

[Dskall (D Kallenberger)]

Maybe do a focus test first.

[stripes (stripes@mac.com)]

@Dskall

Maybe do a focus test first

Focus test is greyed out (“Requires machine with adjustable Z axis”).

[stripes (stripes@mac.com)]

@Dskall

Maybe do a focus test first

Ok, I misunderstood how exactly to set the focus on the Ray (in my defense – I had just built the thing! Can I really be expected to read two more pages of documentation? – More seriously I somehow missed seeing it the first time around).

So with the focus properly set I managed to actually burn some stuff.

Oddly enough it does’t seem like the material test in Lightburn actually seemed to burn things at different speeds/power levels, but maybe I misused it somehow. I did some manual layouts with different shapes and engraved the power levels and speeds I was using inside them and have found some useful values for 3mm MDF (because I have a lot of that in supply, the exciting bit for me will be 6mm because being able to cut that will be new to me).

My results were:

// Snapmaker Ray with 3mm MDF
// - 90%@800 was a solid cut
// - 90%@1000 could be pushed through but wasn’t quite a full cut
// - 90%@2000x2 was like 90%@1000
// - 90%@100, @200, 400 were all solid cuts, but no reason to favor over 800mm/s
// - 20%@6000 marks well, maybe a little faint
// - 90%@2000 is a deep mare with overburn but doesn’t push through