Sunday, November 7, 2010

Plastic Engraving

I've done some work on the CNC machine yesterday and I was able to engrave some really fine text onto plastic. This is the first application for the machine that I have in mind. At work we make some hardware. I'd like to engrave the serial numbers in those cases. As you can see the engraving can easily be done at a lower laser power. Which leads me to the realization I need control over the laser power from EMC2. Maybe Drive4Die or Flexmod.


Also it looks like I'm going to need control over the Z axis to focus the laser on different height materials without having to refocus every time.

I've also noticed the machine isn't quite orthogonal, which is not too much of a surprise :). I'll have to work on that a bit as well. All in all it's looking very good.

2 comments:

  1. Wow, that is looking great on the plastic!

    How thick was the balsa you cut through? How thick do you suppose you could go?

    -Brian

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  2. Hey Brian,

    The balsa was real thin. This laser is not suitable for cutting. I had to turn the feed speed down quite a bit which allowed it to cut but caused a bit of burn around the cut.

    I've read reports that I'd need at least a 1Watt laser to do this, not sure I want to fork out that kind of money.

    - Ron

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