I have been getting a lot of great feedback on another thread I started in January about my experience buying a new weike laser. This question is a little more specific than a review of the experience with buying the machine.
The feedback I got included figuring out how to bypass using my autofocus (it caught some material and popped off) and learn to manually focus the lens. While searching threads for instuctions on how to do this I was lead to discover that my lens was cracked! I had only used it a total of one week so I was surprised. I realized that being a noob I had not really appreciated how much inspection/cleaning I needed to do. I had been cutting cork and poron foam (urethane). the lens was still working but not awesomeSo, aside from my guess that the grime that had built up might have caused the crack, I was wondering what other things cause this? Is it more common when operating the laser at higher power? Is it more common if the laser is not perfectly aligned (mine was not, off by a little)? I also ran the machine without air blowing when I was engraving (but always when I cut, which is what I did 80% of the time). How much does that impact the chance the lens would crack? I saw in one post that someone recommended checking ones lens every hour or two while cutting (that seems really frequent. Is it more necessary with certain types of materials?
Finally, I was trying to cut .25 inch cork with this 38 mm lens (with my 100W machine I was running at 70-80% power). Its my understanding that longer lenses are better for cutting and so I have installed a 100mm lens that I plan to try. I did not realize that the machine has come set up with the smaller focal length lens just out of ignorance. The first lens was ok with cutting this stuff but not amazing. Before now I thought it would be a matter of me learning more about the machine and optimizing things (focus alignment, speed, power, air blowing etc). I also have a 50mm and 63.5mm lens.
A little gun shy about running this new lens again before getting some feedback here. Don't want to crack it for a reason that I haven't guessed at here. I have spent a few hours surfing other posts on this subject that have been really helpful but after a while there became diminishing returns in trying to sleuth out everything I needed to figure out.