Quote Originally Posted by Steven Taitinger View Post
Hi Guys,


I have been browsing for a while and just got my laser setup a couple weeks ago. I have a lot to learn. So far I have played with a bunch of different speed and power settings with a few different types of low quality plywood just to get me started. I know the plywood I am cutting through is crap so that is mostly why the edges are so badly charred. I cut some higher quality plywood and the edges did look nice.

Questions
1
What psi do you run your air assist at? I am getting a lot of burning and I am guessing it is do to the low air pressure from the supplied air compressor. Do most people just use whatever compressor is in their shop or are their compressors more specifically for laser machines?


4
If the laser is aligned perfectly does your cone ever get hot while running the laser? I think my laser might be hitting the side of the cone a bit as it does get a bit hot. It is hard to tell how to adjust it since the mirrors each have the spot pretty much in the center and the spot shape looks different at different heights. Sometimes it looks almost exactly circular and others it looks more like the sharp ellipse. Do you just guess adjusting the last mirror until the spot is perfectly circular?


Steve

H Steve,

I can help you with these two only from my experience.

1) This question is relevant to a distance from the tip of your cone to a material. If distance is small you may not need too much air pressure, if distance is big you will need much more pressure.

With my stock cone for my Spirit GX the distance was about 2cm and the air pump(airbrush small compressor was supplied with the machine) I had a lot of residue around cutting lines. No surprise as air is supposed to blow all smoke away before it sticks to a piece but with about 15psi from that compressor could pump and such a huge distance it was not happening. Then I made an extra tip for the cone from a metal ballpoint pen tip decreasing the distance to about 7-8mm and started using a normal air compressor. Now it runs at 30psi and no residue left on cut pieces.

4)If something is heating then it is not aligned or your tube is not working properly.
I did not have any problem with any parts heating up when my laser was brand new but then I started to notice that my laser head was heating up to 50-65 degrees Celsius on 20 minutes jobs.
I was trying to find what was the problem and I could not until I tried to align my tubes again(I have a double tube laser) and noticed that one of the tubes produces two burn marks instead of one. Then this tube died.
So in my situation I can guess it was the dying tube with abnormal beam profile that was responsible for the head heating up.

It may be not your case and may be your beam is not aligned very well at the head resulting the beam coming not through the center of the hole in your nozzle, hitting its walls and heating the whole part. However it is still good to keep in mind that even when everything seems to be perfectly aligned and it still heats up some parts there is also a possibility that it is a bad tube doing all this bad stuff.