Need help understanding some laser settings...

[Joseph Tovar]

Hi All,

I've been playing around with different sample substrates and am confused about some of the manual settings. For example on some mfg websites I see raster, scribe, and cut settings, but on others just the raster setting...How would I start to guesstimate what the scribe setting would be?

Some also have settings according to the Laser wattage, but don't necessarily tell you if the setting is a % or the actual wattage. If I see that the power setting is greater than the wattage, then I assume it's a percentage. For Example, when I see this:

Setting for 30W laser
45p (I'm assuming Power is 45% of the 30W)
30s (Speed is 30% or 30sec/in??)
500ppi (I get this one)

Then sometime, I simply see this:

Setting for 30W laser
Power(W) 30 (I'm assuming Power is 100% of the 30W)
Speed(sec/in) 2 (I'm not sure here since I don't know what my lasers max speed is)
DPI/PPI 1000/1000 (I get this one)

Lastly, if I see someting like this, I'm not sure where to start:

Setting for 30W laser
Power 30 (30W or 30%)
Speed 20 (sec/in or %)
DPI 500 (The only thing pretty clear)


I have an older VL-200 with both the material DB and the manual settings, but the manual settings only go by percentages and not actual values W, sec/in, etc. Does anyone know the max speed of the VL-200? I guess if I knew the max speed, I could calculate the % in the second example if I needed it to engrave at 2 sec/in.

If anyone has any advice on settings, or can point me to a good article on understanding the settings better, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

[Rodne Gold]

Its almost impossible to give you guidance
Every laser mnfgr has their own settings dependant on the model and power. Settings on one brand of material might not work on another either
There is no "universal" speed and feed and power an PPI calculator...unfortunately you have to experiment with your machine.
Ideally for engraving , if the laser can do it , you want to use the FASTEST speed possible for any job and vary the power , once you have run out of power then you can reduce speed accordingly.
In terms of cutting you want the fastest speed possible and thus a starting point should be 100% power.
The whole idea with the settings is to balance quality with thruput. Pointless doing the job in 2 secs and it being horrible , also pointless in doing the job in 3 minutes with over the top quality where the same can be done with almost no loss in 1 min.