Yag lasers

[Joe Hillmann]

After Christmas things at my shop have slowed a lot and I plan to spend the next few weeks putting random things into my lasers and seeing what happens. Up until now most of my experimenting has been with my CO2's and I want to do some playing and see what I can do with the yag's. So, for those of you who have yag's what unusual uses do you have for it? Or what materials other than metals do you use it for.

[Bruce Boone]

I use mine to deep engrave titanium rings like these.

[Joe Hillmann]

Is your machine built specifically for doing rings? The globe one and the one with the gears are pretty sweet. Also how do you get the engraved area black.

[matthew knott]

yours could do rings much like that, maybe not as fast or quite as good because those are super sweet rings for sure, we do finger print rings and all kinds of special wedding rings with sheet music and the like. Lots of money in medical stuff and there's quite a few companies in your area in that field (so ive been told) and corporate gifts is ok but lots of boxing/unboxing.

[Bruce Boone]

My machine is designed for rings. It is 80 watts and has a tight focus, and that's what it takes to get the deep black marks. I can cut all the way through rings although it takes a while. Here's one with some laser etching, cut throughs, and wood underneath.

[matthew knott]

Nice, do you do your own designs? How do you get wood under the underneath, that must be an art! We have a 40 watt fiber laser that gives the same sort of performance as a 90 watt yag but not cheap, It removes material like crazy but even so to get the depth you have would take a while. If you want to do rings Joe, obviously you need a rotary, we do about 4 a month so not big business for us. Do you know of geti rings in the UK Bruce, they do the uber nice stuff simular (IMO not as nice as your designs) to yours.

[Bruce Boone]

I do my own designs, including the ones with the wood underneath. Here's another variation on that one. Those ones are pretty tricky to make. :D I do know Geti in England. They do quality work. They are the only other company I've seen doing the deep engraved stuff by laser. My laser decision was in part due to what I saw they could do. I had looked at Rofin and LaserStar, but I wanted a more powerful laser and got the first of its kind in the US.

[Joe Hillmann]

Another question are there any items that you used to do in your CO2 lasers and when you tried them in your YAG you were supprised at how much time you could save?

Here are a few ways that I have found to use the Yag.

Stone tiles used to take about 30 mins in the CO2 and would just barley get marked. With the yag I can do the same picture in 2or 3 minutes and the image actually gets carved deeply into the tile making color filling much easier.

When doing clay brick in the CO2 just made a white mark on the brick, with the yag it turns the engraved area to glass and is much faster.

Rowmark engraves (haven't tried cutting yet) much faster and no residue to clean up in the yag. (it takes about 5 seconds to engrave a name tag in the yag.

Some leathers seem to engrave nicer with the yag as well.

[matthew knott]

We are in the process of trying the chem etch cermark for glass on a yag as i still dont like the effect the co2 gives, i really want that sandblast look !! I will post some pictures when ive done them. Anodised works better with the yag, it also has the advantage/disadvantage or removing the anodise layer and leaving the the surface conductive. We spent loads of time with a big aerospace company doing prototype work, they decided (without telling us) the best option was to do it themselves and buy a laser, i had a good laugth when they phoned to say their bits looked the same as ours but now they didnt have a conductive path and could they tell us what they where doing wrong. Wouldnt mind but they spent loads of our time with the promise of lots of work, simply told them that they had wasted £20k on the wrong machine and the small batch they needed doing to get out of a hole would have 10 hours labour added to cover wasted time or we werent interested.
Not sure what lens size you have joe (think its 100) bit a 163 lens allows you to mark about 140mm area and we find that covers 90% of jobs, be the first upgrade i would look at, bigger spot means faster engraving too.

[Joe Hillmann]

Matt, at the moment I am pretty happy with the speed(with the hans it used to take me 4min 50 seconds to do one part with the electrox it takes 45 seconds)
The lens I have now lets me mark a 203mm diameter circle and I use every bit of it and sometimes more by raising the height of items that are farther from the center. The one upgrade I plan to do this month is to go back and reread all the messages you sent me so I can get started on hooking up a rotatory to it. I do lots of mugs with it and have to keep my marking area to less then 46 mm on them.

[matthew knott]

you must have a 254 lens, you will find it hard to get a decent mark on metal with that, it will mark it but not very well, the spot size is just to big, gold and silver you have no chance of deep engraving, i thought you had a 100mm lens!!

[Joe Hillmann]

The stick I use for focusing is about 12 3/4inches.

[matthew knott]

should be 323mm to be exact, that will be SIL 254 lens, nice large working area but big spot size, if you want to do metal get a 160 lens, i know someone in Finland thats selling a new one, they where an agent for electrox but gave it up years ago so it should be cheap, they dont cost much anyway. Will make a big difference IMHO !

[Bruce Boone]

Does anyone know about the new Kern fiber laser? I don't see any specs on power or pricing anywhere. I haven't called for an official quote, but am interested to know more.

[matthew knott]

there's only a few companies that acutually make fibre lasers due to the masive expense required to set up a production plant, they are a throw back from the hudge bom in the telecoms sector of several years ago when they had billions of investor money. The big players are IPG (german-rusian outfit) SPI (uk but owned by TRUMPF). Everyone fits one of these lasers to their machine, Epilog use IPG and Kern by the look of things use SPI as they have samples with the SPI logo on there website. They probably do a 10,20,30 & 40 watt as thats what SPI sell right now, price i havent got a clue, but its not a galvo laser so will have a large working area and very small laser spot size but be slow.