Hi all,
A few months ago I finished building my cnc router machine with a working area of 2400mm X 1800mm running cambam and mach 3. I recently just finished adding a chinese 150w CO2 laser to it. It can now laser cut and router. Things seem to be working, but being completely new to nearly all aspects of the build and piecing together what information I can from this site and google I have a few questions regarding the laser side of things - having bought all the laser stuff from china, obviously the included information/instructions are lacking...
1. What is the ideal temperature I should set the chiller to? It's set by default to 25c celcius. I read somewhere going above 30c can degrade tube life?
2. I'm looking to replace the mirrors and lens I'm currently using (being the very first time i've ever done this has "degraded" their performance). What mirror material would be ideal? I see gold plated, SI and MO. Gold plated seems to be the cheapest so I'm assuming its crap or for small lasers, so should I get SI or MO?
3. The little packing case that the mirrors and lens came in has indistinguishable hand writing on it so I can't even make out the product codes or type. But I'm assuming my lens is 19mm, ZnSe, ~58mm focal length. I was told a 150w co2 laser can cut up to 25mm thick wood. I mostly use anything from 3mm MDF, through to 12-16mm particle board and ply but one day I would like to get into the harder stuff. My laser head is fairly high up so I'm thinking a 100mm focal length would be best? Does longer = deeper cuts?
4. If using a 100mm focal length, I would have to change the "nozzle" on the laser head to a longer one, otherwise the beam would be hitting inside the nozzle and not completely all the way through and into the stock?
5. While I've only just started doing some cutting with it, I find it's ability to cut rather lacking - though I assume this is entirely my fault. One of the mirrors got royaly smoked up and the gold plating rubbed off in an attempt to clean it (don't do that again) and so I changed it to a spare I had and the cutting power vastly increased (it couldn't even get through 6mm MDF at full power and after the swap it can burn straight through at bare minimum power) so I can see having nice clean lenses is important in regards to power. But what about alignment accuracy? While every effort was taken to make sure the beam hits dead center on every mirror how much performance can be degraded if the beam hits 3-5mm off center of a reflection mirror, even if it hits the next one dead on?
6. What feed speed should I be looking at to cut 16mm particle board? At the moment I have to set it to something hell slow like 20mm/min and max laser power - is this about right or do I need to have another look into clean mirrors/lens and aligning?
7. focus lens, rounded side faces into the stock?
8. What general guide lines are there for deep cuts? For example, should it be done in one slow pass, or several quicker passes and then lowering the laser head/focus length each time?
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
A few months ago I finished building my cnc router machine with a working area of 2400mm X 1800mm running cambam and mach 3. I recently just finished adding a chinese 150w CO2 laser to it. It can now laser cut and router. Things seem to be working, but being completely new to nearly all aspects of the build and piecing together what information I can from this site and google I have a few questions regarding the laser side of things - having bought all the laser stuff from china, obviously the included information/instructions are lacking...
1. What is the ideal temperature I should set the chiller to? It's set by default to 25c celcius. I read somewhere going above 30c can degrade tube life?
2. I'm looking to replace the mirrors and lens I'm currently using (being the very first time i've ever done this has "degraded" their performance). What mirror material would be ideal? I see gold plated, SI and MO. Gold plated seems to be the cheapest so I'm assuming its crap or for small lasers, so should I get SI or MO?
3. The little packing case that the mirrors and lens came in has indistinguishable hand writing on it so I can't even make out the product codes or type. But I'm assuming my lens is 19mm, ZnSe, ~58mm focal length. I was told a 150w co2 laser can cut up to 25mm thick wood. I mostly use anything from 3mm MDF, through to 12-16mm particle board and ply but one day I would like to get into the harder stuff. My laser head is fairly high up so I'm thinking a 100mm focal length would be best? Does longer = deeper cuts?
4. If using a 100mm focal length, I would have to change the "nozzle" on the laser head to a longer one, otherwise the beam would be hitting inside the nozzle and not completely all the way through and into the stock?
5. While I've only just started doing some cutting with it, I find it's ability to cut rather lacking - though I assume this is entirely my fault. One of the mirrors got royaly smoked up and the gold plating rubbed off in an attempt to clean it (don't do that again) and so I changed it to a spare I had and the cutting power vastly increased (it couldn't even get through 6mm MDF at full power and after the swap it can burn straight through at bare minimum power) so I can see having nice clean lenses is important in regards to power. But what about alignment accuracy? While every effort was taken to make sure the beam hits dead center on every mirror how much performance can be degraded if the beam hits 3-5mm off center of a reflection mirror, even if it hits the next one dead on?
6. What feed speed should I be looking at to cut 16mm particle board? At the moment I have to set it to something hell slow like 20mm/min and max laser power - is this about right or do I need to have another look into clean mirrors/lens and aligning?
7. focus lens, rounded side faces into the stock?
8. What general guide lines are there for deep cuts? For example, should it be done in one slow pass, or several quicker passes and then lowering the laser head/focus length each time?
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.