Postion of items in Laser / Speed

[Andrea Weissenseel]

When I did my trays today, I ran the first one by itself it needed 17 mins to engrave. Then I positioned two of them beside each other, and they took 47 mins - at last I ran three of them underneath each other and they only took 51 mins

So apparently it saves a lot of Lasertime when positioning items along the Y-axis

[Mike Null]

That would be contrary to my results. I wonder if your drawing plate in the x mode might have a bearing on the result.

[Andrea Weissenseel]

I wonder if your drawing plate in the x mode might have a bearing on the result.

Mike, I'm not quiet sure what you mean

[Scott Shepherd]

I agree with Mike, that's the opposite of what should be happening. If you have a row of text, say name tags, and they are all the same, running from left to right, you can take the height and divide that by the distance the Y-Axis moves each stroke. Say it's .005", and the text is .375" tall. That's 75 strokes of the Y-Axis to produce the letters.

Now, take that same name tags, 10 of them, and place them in a row on the Y-Axis. Now it's 10 x .375 the Y-Axis needs to travel, or 750 strokes of the Y-Axis to cover the text.

The X-Axis strokes are shorter that way, but I've never seen anything engraved in the Y direction go faster than in the X direction. I'd be interested to know what's causing this as well.

[Mike DeRegnaucourt]

I'm a bit confused by Mike & Scott's answers. It's been my experience that when you keep the x-axis travel minimized and lay your items in a vertical orientation (along the y-axis) I've seen faster engraving times. This was the whole idea of some posts awhile back to reduce engraving times by using the color mapping feature. By using specific colors and the color mapping feature, you could setup the engraving job to engrave one particular color first and then the next and so on. The Corel layout was setup so that say everything in column '1' was colored black, column '2' was colored say blue, and column '3' was colored say green. Then in the color mapping, the top-to-bottom list of colors was black, blue, then green each with the same settings. This permitted the engraver to engrave the first column of items, followed by the second and finally the third. This prevented the laser from having to travel over all the "dead space" along the x-axis between the columns which wasted time.

Think about it a little differently, say we were engraving two items on the laser bed. One item being placed in the upper left corner while the next identical item was placed in the upper right corner. Look how far the laser head has to travel for each line engraved. There is all that space between the two items in which no 'work' is being accomplished.

I hope all that made sense. Maybe I'm not understanding Mike & Scott correctly.

Just my 2-cents.

[Mike DeRegnaucourt]

Here's a link from Epilog's site about: Using Raster Color Mapping to Save Engraving Time This should help explain my post above better.

http://www.epiloglaser.com/tl_raster_color_mapping.htm

[Dan Hintz]

The smaller the mass to move, the faster it is able to travel. For the majority of systems out there, the X-axis lens carriage is the smallest movable mass. This means X-axis motion will be the fastest. However, you need to take into account distance between engraved sections. If two plaques have a 1" square in their upper right corners as the only engraving, it will probably be faster to orient the plaques so the squares are above each other vertically. If the engraved section is along the entire top of the plaque, the faster solution will be placing them side by side.

[Michael Simpson Virgina]

It all seems to depend on the dead space between adjacent items.

[Dan Hintz]

It all seems to depend on the dead space between adjacent items.

Exactly. In my examples above, even thought the X-axis is the fastest, if you placed the two plaques with 1" squares on them horizontally, you're spending a lot of time moving between the two squares with nothing being engraved. By placing them vertically, one square is finished before moving onto the next.

[Scott Shepherd]

Exactly, the dead space matters. In my example, there were 10 name tags on 1 row, or 1 column of 10 name tags. Early on I used to almost always make the mistake of arranging things down the Y-Axis because I thought I was saving more of the material to some degree. Not actually, but I liked cutting off 3" from a end instead of cutting of 3" across the top.

However, I quickly learned I was making a huge, time wasting mistake. A great example of this would be pens. If you made a fixture to hold the top end of pens, so you could do 10 pens at 1 time, versus 10 pens in a row down the Y-Axis, you could do the 10 pens in the X-Axis in about 20 seconds. So you could do 10 pens in 20 seconds, or 2 seconds each. Now put them in a row on the Y and it'll take you well over a minute, or well over 10 seconds each. That's been my experience.

[Mike Null]

The fastest engraving is done by making optimal use of the x axis.

[Kim Vellore]

I cant use the new driver but in this example if the object was rotated 90 degrees, it will save more time... just a thought...
Kim

Here's a link from Epilog's site about: Using Raster Color Mapping to Save Engraving Time This should help explain my post above better.

http://www.epiloglaser.com/tl_raster_color_mapping.htm

[Rodne Gold]

It depends how the laser treats dead space , if you are engraving slow , some lasers or drivers will traverse dead space at the speed set and not speed up or "skip" it , if you traversed dead space as quick as the head can (at max speed) you would probably find horizontal layout better than vertical in that case.
As has been mentioned , much depends on the graphic itself and where and how its positioned on the item. .
What we have found in some instance is that multiples can take LONGER if set up in a matrix jig than making a single item jig and engraving one by one
There is actually no hard and fast rule in terms of speed optimisation as it is system and graphic dependant

[Andrea Weissenseel]

It depends how the laser treats dead space , if you are engraving slow , some lasers or drivers will traverse dead space at the speed set and not speed up or "skip" it

Thats exactly what my laser did, you could see that it was going far slower (in an constant speed, not skipping dead space) when I arranged the items horizontal

[Rodne Gold]

Andrea , Try the cluster setting in your driver. i think there are other settings that avoid this in your driver , havent worked with the spirit for a while so can't tell you the exact ones.