Hi all, I come to you with an experiment I would like to run.
I am part of Bristol Hackspace, and we needed some signage for something. We have a favourite font to use for this, OCR A Extended. I like to run a fast and shallow cut pattern before/after an engraving pass to crisp up the edges of text.
What I’ve found, using both an XTool S1 and a Larger (and older) CO2 cabinet laser, is that OCR A Extended is very difficult to cut. This is the attempt that our CO2 laser made at 80mm/s
The lower case S in particular seems to give both lasers a lot of trouble. I would like to request some help in an experiment.
OCR A Extended is a free font and can easily be found to download.
How fast can your laser cut (not engrave!) this font to an acceptable standard?
Genuinely curious to see what the results are, I look forward to seeing your responses!
That font is no different than any other where you only burn the outline and not do a fill. When I see that type of wiggle, it is usually caused by mechanical issues with the laser. The situation where you have two of them with this issue in a Makerspace is not particularly surprising.
Making 1/4" tall text at 4800mm/m will definitely test the mechanics of the laser. I have made readable text in wood 1mm tall using the ISO9 (SHX) font with a 10w laser. Your machines need a tune-up for sure.
The overall job time went from 11 s to 8 s, so slowing down doesn’t change the performance nearly as much as you’d think. I reduced the power from 20% to 10%, although the results on acrylic will be different.
Might be time for a thorough mechanical checkup and perhaps new belts for that puppy.
However, given the mass of the moving parts and the gantry’s bent sheet metal construction, speed may be the only way to change the outcome:
And the controller gets the final word, no matter what I thought:
