GearHeads Forum

Just ran a test while cutting 2mm MDF at 6mA and 3mA power settings at speeds from 20mm/s down to 5mm/s. I have attached a photo of the results as seen from the backside of the material. The 6mA is not a great improvement over the 3mA?

I'm cutting some 2mm MDF at the moment using 3mA @ 6mm/s and cutting fine with those settings so thought i would try the linear theory. I doubled the power to 6mA and doubled the speed to 12mm/s cut it needed two passes to cut through the material. Is this what you would expect?

Yes, looks the same as mine.

It's just the lens that came with the laser. The only things I've done is to add a DIY air assist using an air brush compressor that seems to work really well and realign the optics (which may need revisiting if this is the source of the discrepancy).

For added info. My Chinese laser (and it is one of the cheap ones) is supposed to be rated at 40W. I have no way of knowing how accurate this is. It's analogue meter reads from 0 - 15mA. I find it takes 1.5mA to fire the laser. I don't really know if its best to use high laser power and fast speeds ...

Art, I tend to leave the laser power the same and compensate by adjusting the speed. As a general observation, If I need to cut at the longest beam length I have to reduce the speed to approx 60% of the speed I would use if I only needed to cut at the shortest beam length. My bed is 300mm x 200mm.

Thanks Art, Very interesting. I'll spend some time re-checking the beam geometry.

Hello, first time on this forum so please correct me if I do anything wrong. I currently have a chinese laser running LaserDRAW and I'm verry happy with it but while LaserDraw does what it says on the tin it is limited in function so replacing the current controller with a Pokey card and running ...