Minimum power on chinese lasers

[Mohammed Issa]

is it just me, or do all chinese machines give NO POWER under 10%?
if i program the machine (through Laserworks) to anything below 10%, it will do the job, but it wont turn the laser on.

anyone have this problem/issue? or is it just how this machine is setup?

ive got a chinese 60W CO2 laser.

thanks,

[Rodne Gold]

Yes , the glass tubes don't fire at under 10% and some don't work well at even 15% , the big problem is that if cutting very thin stuff or engraving materias that need very very low power , you cannot go fast enough to use higher powers where the laser fires properly as these are generally not the speediest machines around.. there are always some compromises you have to make with these lower cost machines.

[Mohammed Issa]

Yes , the glass tubes don't fire at under 10% and some don't work well at even 15% , the big problem is that if cutting very thin stuff or engraving materias that need very very low power , you cannot go fast enough to use higher powers where the laser fires properly as these are generally not the speediest machines around.. there are always some compromises you have to make with these lower cost machines.

it all makes sense now, thank you.
i was actually thinking of getting servos instead of stepper motors from the chinese manufacturer, do you think that would have been a good option (table size around 300mm*500mm)

thanks again!

[Rodne Gold]

I don't think you will realise huge speed increases with servos , you would be better off using a cheaper lower powered tube, say a 40watt , or if you have the money , convert your laser to use a RF tube like a synrad..(probably cost you more than the original machine)
In the interim , what you can try is raise your max speed if your software allows you access to the mnfgrs settings , you can raise it till you get errors or the steppers gall or moan and then back down a bit.
The chinese laser heads are quite heavy compared to some other makes , so when engraving , even raising speed might not help , especially as the laser changes direction as the head has high inertia and wont allow radical accel/decel , by lightening it and maybe using a more efficient bearing/slide system , you might be able to speed it up even more with fiddling with other speed related settings.

[Mohammed Issa]

they say (chinese manufacturer) they use high-end Taiwanese tracks, but God knows what that means. i would think changing the tracks would make the most difference. but for now, im just going to realize the limits of the machine and enjoy what it can offer me. as they say, if it aint broke, dont fix it. so im thinking of just waiting until one of those parts start to fail, then i would probably think of upgrading.

having read a post on here earlier, stating that anything over around 500mm/s on the chinese machines would be pretty much the same (which is the same thing you are saying), what would be the max speed (realistically speaking) of a chinese machine with servos, instead of steppers?
also, i would like to know what is the max speed of the epilogs in mm/s? does it even compare to the chinese speed?


i really appreciate all that information! thanks!

[George Carlson]

I upgraded my laser to the controller made by LightObject. It has a PPI (pulse per inch) function. Using this function I can cleanly cut paper and other low power uses. As I remember, Laser Cut has a "hole" function. You can specify how often a hole (pulse) is made. This probably would produce the same results as using PPI.

[Walt Langhans]

Yes , the glass tubes don't fire at under 10% and some don't work well at even 15%

As it just so happens I will be attempting to engrave oil board that is .015" thick so about .38mm do you have a guess where I should start with my settings?

[Vicki Rivrud]

Hi George,
Did you replace a Leetro board with the Lightobject?

I've been thinking about replacing the 6515 - did you have to make any other changes? Steppers??

The big lose I will have is the pile of Lasercut ecp files that the Lightobject will not read.

So I'm researching!

Any advise or input would be appreciated,
Vicki

[tommy suriady]

my 80watt laser goes to bellow 1% and we see a difference even between .5% and 1% when engraving.
mine uses the wisdom board.

[Dan Hintz]

my 80watt laser goes to bellow 1% and we see a difference even between .5% and 1% when engraving.
mine uses the wisdom board.

This is a glass tube? If so, I don't see how that's possible as at that low current you can't get the gas to begin lasing...

[Rodne Gold]

Maybe 0% is actually 10 or 15%.....my reci 80w and my cheaper 60w wont fire at low power % (very low milliamp readings)

[Daniel Wolanski]

My Lasercut 5.3 board has a quirk where if I choose 10% power, I get 100%! If I choose 11% or 9% it is fine. I can get my tube to fire down to 7% but no lower.

[George Carlson]

Yes, I replaced the Leetro 6515 with the LighObject AWB-608B. I did not change any stepper drivers or motors. There is a slight difference in the way the controller controls the blow off air. I did install a bigger motor for the Z-Axis, but that was not related to the controller. I think I put a post on the Chinese Laser Forum back when I did it. Take a look see.
There were two primary reasons for making the change. First, in my opinion the dongle is just stupid. Why would they feel like they need to protect software that could only be used on their controller? I like to do design and setup of files in my quiet office, not next to the noisy laser. But with the Leetro system, I would have had to purchase additional dongles, which are high $.
Secondly, the LightObject controller supports Ethernet. This means that I can develop jobs from any computer on my network and download them into any laser on the network. I only have one laser, but if I did this commercially and had several machines, it would be nice to use a single workstation to control all machines.
I’ve had the AWC-608B for about six months and I’m really happy with it.

[George Carlson]

I probably was not very clear when I was tking about using PPI or the "Hole" mode. Using these modes enables you to set the power to 35%, to make sure the laser fires properly. But the results is a trail of small holes. My laser tends to produce holes that are about 0.008" in diameter. So if I set the spacing to 0.008 (or 125 PPI) the result whould be a cut the holes just touching, but the heat put into the work is much less, the equivalent of about 17%. If you space the holes futher apart, less heat is put into the work and a perferated line starts to appear. If you are cutting light paper, this is great, because the paper does not come loose on its own and blow around inside the machine. Pull out the completed page and pop out the cut objects. In cutting projects for my grandkids, using construction paper, I set the power to 25% and the PPI to 50. When finished, I hand the pages to the kids and they pop out the objects they want to use. It works great.