YAG Laser Settings

[Brandon Beck-2]

Does anybody have an older flashlamp pumped yag they would be willing to share some settings they use for different processes? Our qswitch goes up to 50khz, so I'd just be interested where other people start from to find the best settings on materials. We do aluminum, stainless, and carbon steel, deep engrave and annealing, but would like to know if anybody has had success getting different colors with a machine like this on steel like like you see with the new fiber lasers.

[Gary Hair]

The only thing I can contribute is that it is extremely difficult to get consistent color with stainless but fairly easy with Titanium. You can mark the same piece of stainless today and tomorrow and get different colors. With my limited experimenting with Titanium I can tell you that the size of the area you are marking makes a big difference as well - the larger the area the more consistent the color. Can't really help with settings for your machine, but thought I'd share what I have found.