Scoring and cutting card. How big a laser?

[Steve Tidman]

Hi All,
I have a small startup business making card models and am looking at buying a chinese laser to cut and score.

The card is 1mm thick (600gsm) and it needs to be scored part way so it can be folded and then it can be cut. As my wife has a cake business I would also be making cake toppers by cutting perspex up to 6mm.

I need to know what laser is acceptable to score the card from experienced people. Ideally I am thinking Shenhui SH-G1280 with an 80W tube (or equivalent Redsail or G.Weike machine). The big work area will make the machine versatile for larger jobs.

I am concerned that this may not able to get the power low enough to merely score the card (even at 10%).

I have been reading the forums but I have not found the answer I am looking for.

Thanks for all your help,
Steve

[Nicolas Silva]

Hello. I routinely cut poster board for gift boxes. (1/64" roughly 1/2 mm). I run it at 50% power and 100% speed to score it. That's about 22 watts of power.
I run it at 100% power (45w) and 30% speed to cut. 80w should be MORE than sufficient to work with the card stock of 1mm. Just play with the speed to find your optimal formula.
sorry can't help with the perspex. cheers!

[Mike Audleman]

Can't answer Perspex capability and I am not an expert. Far from it, I am just starting too.

That said, when I started with my ebay 50w machine, poster board is one of the first things I tried doing (cheap and easy) and it did it very easily. I downloaded some folding box plans as well as petal boxes to start with. I can tell you the 50w is way more than capable of cutting poster board. I was running it at like 15% power and 250mm/s speed and it cut just fine and left nice clean edges. Scoring for folds were down to 10% power at 500mm/s and I used dot mode lines. Thats for white poster board from the dollar store. Colors, well, they took less power for some reason, maybe it absorbed the IR more efficiently. Black, well scoring black was almost impossible. It would cut through many times.

From what I understand many higher power lasers have difficulty at very low power settings which is what you need for paper/poster board. So, I would be shopping for a laser just powerful enough to do your Perspex but not over-do it power wise. I mean, you don't need a laser capable of vaporizing a bulldozer if you are doing eye surgery if you get my drift.

[John Noell]

We did a lot of paper like that and perspex as well with a 45 watt Epilog. Maybe Chinese models need a bit more power to achieve the same but I don't know (yet - mine is on its way). We used lines in dot mode to "score" the paper. We played with the type of dotted line to get the optimal combinaton of looks and foldability.

[Steve Tidman]

Thanks for all your help.

It sounds like an 80W laser may be a bit too powerful to score. Unfortunately I cannot use the dotted line for scoring and folding as I think it will affect the final appearance of the model.

Probably a 60W laser will be a safer and more sensible buy.

The perspex reference was to indicate that this is not only going to work with paper but be more general purpose. I am confident that as long as I do not get too small a laser I will have no problem with the perspex.

[Mike Audleman]

I am pretty sure if you get a laser capable of cutting perspex it will do paper ;)

As far as the dotted line goes, you can change the dot length and spacing, at least I can and I have the cheapo software and laser.

Here is a link to the boxes I "cut" my teeth on:
http://www.rabbitlaserusa.com/DownloadableProjects.html

[Rich Harman]

I don't know if dot mode is the same for other lasers but on mine the laser head stops to fire each dot, I don't know why they didn't make it just fire the dots wile moving.