Your experience with a dying tube?

[Steve Busey]

For those that have had a tube get old & decrepit on them, what was the general pattern of it's demise?

I ask, because when I try a long raster job (~15-20 min) or a fairly simple vector job, it starts off fine, but shortly into the job everything just fades out.

After doing some other small jobs yesterday, I tried to create a jig out of a piece of 1/8" acrylic I had cut before. I tried to cut 10 slots to hold standard #2 pencils. Yesterday, on the 1/8" settings, it would not cut all the way through. Powered down overnight. Today, I started it up, and choose the the 1/4" setting. Managed to cut out the first slot, but on the second, it barely cut through one edge of the rectangle.

Epilog says: focus, align, level. Just did that recently, and just run hobbyist volume of projects through it. But am guessing if I go back in a few hours and try the second slot again, it will do the one and then quit.

Mine's a 2008 laser, so it wouldn't surprise me if it's dying - just curious on how your tubes have died...

[Joe Pelonio]

My first tube started to cut broken lines, like random length perforations. The next one that went just dropped power, gradually at first, just had to use more power/slower speed a little every week. Then it started to drop fast, every job required new settings for the same material so I went ahead and ordered a new one. The first only went a few months but was on warranty, the second lasted about 5,000 hours.

[Rodne Gold]

I've had any number of symptoms , dotted lines when cutting , gradual drop off in power over time , sharp drop to 1/2 power then complete failure and just sudden complete failure..

[Jiten Patel]

We had ours fail on us recently, had a drop in power to around 50% with uneven cutting - and exactly as you said changing settings for the same stuff you cut on a day to day basis. Luckily ours was on warranty and got a shiny new one for free.

[Gary Gunderson]

The last one that died on me was just like Rodne experienced -- dropped to about 1/2 power, and then that was it.

Prior to that, I had one that lost power more gradually (you'll notice it first with the thickest materials you used to be able to cut), but then had lots of odd behavior with cut lines -- drop-outs, squiggles, etc.