What are the minimum requirements when marking metal
Depends on what you mean by mark ?
There is engraving, where the machine is actually removing metal from the material. There is marking where the heat (anneal or oxidize) or an exteranl coating of some compound will be fused to the metal…
Can you clarify?
It might help to describe what you are attempting to accomplish…
If you wish to mark metal, it generally requires a fiber type laser. It is at the sort of stage with most low cost dpssl (diode)…
I want to etch aluminum bare
A low end 20W fiber should do that… the more power, the deeper per pass. The depth isn’t really isn’t critical with aluminum.
Good luck
is there and diode laser that will do it?
Bare Aluminum is too heat conductive to be marked with a visible (blue) light laser.
If you can work with anodized aluminum, the situation is better. The anodized layer can be fried.
You can do some marking, but probably not very good results with bare aluminum. Aluminum reflects about 97% or more of the beam energy, so a 10W laser would get 0.3W into the material…
If you watch some of the xTool or other engraving manufacturers videos, they show them marking it.
At this point, I’d wouldn’t suggest a visible light dpssl for this application.
You can watch a bunch of videos and make a decision if the marking is up to your standards. I’ve read lots of threads of people trying to reproduce the output they saw in videos…
A visible light dpssl is really the wrong tool for metals. It’s also why most laser engraving hobbyists don’t do metals…
Co2 machines don’t do metal in the hobby class.
Good luck
Thank you!
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