Hi, I’m wondering if anyone else has experienced this before because I’m kind of at my wit’s end. Having this weird issue between my second and third mirror where it’s aligned perfectly in the middle left to right across X, and cuts perfectly all the way over on the left side where the 3rd mirror stays close to the 2nd, which makes sense. Then cut becomes very weak like a misaligned laser more toward the center and right.
I am getting a perfect burn match on the far left (Y center) and far right (Y center) but then as it moves toward Y top and Y bottom it starts to drift way up on both ends. Thought at first that it might be a sagging rail, but this is a pretty robust machine and I’m doubting that but as far as what else it may be, I have no earthly idea but maybe I just don’t understand fully how I should be aligning this even though I’ve watched all the videos and read all the stuff and paid a guy not that small of an amount of money to get on the facetime with me for two hours
Take a picture of a manual pulse into a paper targets at Mirror 1 so we can look over your shoulder.
It should be a circular spot, darker in the center, and perfectly symmetric, showing the tube is operating in TEM00 mode. A recent discussion involving tube resonance may be informative, particularly when following the links to references:
Let’s make sure the tube is operating properly before diagnosing anything else.
As @ednisley says, you have to make sure that the laser tube is operating in TEM00 mode. I had almost the same problem, the laser tube would cut better on the left side than on the right side. I thought that my mirrors were not aligned correctly, but on the end of the looking for the problem, I concluded that laser tube was not operating in TEM00 mode.
