Help with some Settings on my Epilog Summit and CorelDRAW

[Jim Benham]

Hello all. I am a newbie to this form, and a newbie to laser, however i have been in the CNC industry for quite some time. I manufacture tablet mounts and holders and am looking for some help on a laser machine I just picked up. Any help is much appreciated!

I purchased an Epilog Summit that was from the original owner and was said to have less than 1000 hours on it. The machine is in excellent shape and came with everything you can think of since day one. The laser is 25w and has never been replaced or recharged. I originally hooked it up to the laptop that the lady provided me with that was running Windows ME, and CorelDraw 9. Fortunately Epilog still has drivers available for the Summit so I was able to install Windows 7 32 bit with a copy of CorelDraw X5 ran through a USB to Parallel port to the machine. The primary job of the machine is going to etch our logo and part numbers on the holders, which are manufactured out of acrylic or powder coated aluminum. I tried etching out some text on a piece of acrylic and didn't have much luck. The power of the laser just seemed not very strong no matter what I tried. After messing around with it for a few days I realized that there were some dirty mirrors and lenses, so I did a thorough cleaning of all of them including the first mirror on the bottom of the machine which was super dirty. Now I'm able to successfully etch acrylic, but it just still doesn't seem powerful enough for what I need.
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Below is an example of what I'm trying to do with the machine:

Engrave our logo on to a holder that is manufactured out of aluminum then powder coated black.

Power is at 100%, Speed is at 8% (I've tried lowering the speed down to 1% even and it doesn't seem to benefit me much)
The file is a PDF, I've tried EPS with the same outcome.
I have the focus set right on the part. I've tried going a little higher and lower but no benefit.

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Here are the settings that I have on my computer
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Questions:

As you can notice on the first pass it does a better job of outlining the part than it does with removing the fill in the middle. Is this normal?
With a 25W machine it shouldn't take me 3 passes to get this outcome should it?
Are there any settings that I should be changing when engraving from the above screen shots?


Thanks ahead of time for all your help!

[Jim Benham]

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[Braden Todd]

Have you tried using denatured alcohol on the engraving? I've had some powder coat leave a residue that the alcohol took off nicely.

I have also noticed that if my power is too high, the smoke/vapor from the engraving allows the powder coat to re adhere to the material.

Id try a little alcohol and if that doesn't work play with your power and make sure your vacuum is working well too.

Good luck!

[Jim Benham]

Thanks Braden. I'll give those a try tomorrow. I was wondering if it's melting the powder coat and adhering back.

[Mike Null]

Jim

I'm of the opinion that your tube has degraded and needs to be replaced. That said, powder coated surfaces are rarely uniform so engraving time can vary and I have always needed to take two passes but the second pass is just a clean up pass.

I ran mine at 100% power and 35% speed on a 45 watt machine. That would probably be the equivalent of 90% speed on your machine which again leads me to believe you need to check the power on your tube.

[Scott Shepherd]

Either your beam needs to aligned or your tube is going bad, like Mike said is my guess. 8% speed isn't something you see much on anything. That's an indication something is wrong. Beam could be out of alignment, but that's a really old machine to have the original tube. It's well over 10 years old and tubes don't normally last that long, from a statistical point of view.

[Jim Benham]

Thanks guys. I've definitely been thinking that the tube is going out as well, just wanting to check everything else first. Do you know how to check alignment and power of the laser? I looked in the manual but it doesn't say anything about alignment.

Also, I've been talking with a company about not only recharging my tube but swapping the laser out for a 50 watt laser. He quoted me $3150 which doesn't seem too bad, but I would have to do the install. Has anyone heard of doing this before? I would hate to do the upgrade and have it not work correctly.

[Mike Null]

Jim

There is a power meter you can rent or borrow from Epilog. I would not opt for that 50 watt tube until you check with Epilog tech support to see if your machine will support a 50 watt unit and what else you have to do to make the upgrade. Tubes are not usually up-gradable without other changes.

I have installed a tube on both ULS and Trotec. It's easy and doesn't take much time but in both cases I installed the same wattage that I removed.

[Jim Benham]

I'll give Epilog a call on Monday and see what they say. They have been pretty good at working with me on this, but I have to hear how old of a machine I have every time I call lol..

[Glen Monaghan]

Powder coat can be highly variable. I've engraved thousands of the same powder coated stainless steel pieces and find that I have to adjust settings with each new shipment to get clean results. And I typically have to wipe off the engraving with a bit of pressure to make it look its best, unless I run a 2nd pass which I only do when I find some of the pieces have particularly thick coating compared to the others in that batch. Using air and engraving from bottom to top helps, but the powder coat still usually leaves some residue that has to be cleaned up.

You've cleaned the optics, and need to check both focus and alignment. Epilog can get you the alignment procedure and you can use the oft-cited ramp method to check your focus. After that, you probably should check the power output of your tube. You can rent a laser power meter from Epilog, Laserbits, and other places, or purchase one of those "meat thermometer" power meters for about the same money that will be "good enough" to determine the health of your tube.

I have no idea whether that model of Epilog was ever intended to operate with a 50W tube but there's almost no chance that you can install a 50W tube in that machine without replacing at least the power supply, part of the wiring harness, and cooling fans as well. However, replacing those items is not particularly difficult. I'd check with Epilog though, regarding the supplier of that tube and the specific make/model to ensure it is compatible and you are getting everything you need to successfully upgrade.

[Jim Benham]

I was able to go play around on the machine today. I found that at 80% power and 25% speed it worked much better and only took 2 passes to get all the paint off. I then worked with some acrylic and was able to engrave some images at 75% power and 50% speed. I'm going to reach out to Epilog tomorrow to see if they can help me with calibrating the laser but all in all I think it's doing ok for such an old machine. Thanks for all the input so far.