50W Fiber Laser settings for marking titanium

[John Kleiber]

This morning I got an email from a customer wanting me to engrave a Titanium Knife handle. I have never engraved Titanium and after a non in-depth search did not find anything.

I have read lased Titanium prone is to yellowing which I do not think would work well for this application.

Does anyone have any suggestions regarding settings?

Power?
Speed?
Freq?

50w Fiber Laser
EZCad2

This is the knife. It always drives me crazy.... Customers want knife grips engraved.... then they buy a knife with limited engraving area.

353409

Thanks - John

[Kev Williams]

It's funny stuff to fiber, but it only goes yellow like stainless goes yellow. I've engraved a few dozen titanium bolt shrouds and suppressors. It deep engraves fairly easy, but really throws off a fireworks show at times. Seems to burn black much easier than stainless, but 'burn' is the key word.

Have you told them the engraving will be bright, or dark?

I'm learning to start with the bright approach, and go from there. For your 50w machine I'd use a .06mm X-hatch, start at 1500 speed, 5% power and 85khz. You'll likely just get a polish at this setting. Lower the freq to 75 and run. If not much change, raise the power to 10%. Then lower the speed to 1400... etc etc... This is working towards a good bright hatch. If you're going for dark, I'd start the same way and lower the frequency until you get fireworks. Then move the freq up 10 points then raise the power slightly and lower the speed slightly...

This would be a whole lot easier if you had your own piece of titanium to play with! :D -- you might talk to a local metal shop and get a piece... a 2" x 4" x .06" piece won't cost all that much, and using it prudently you can do a lot of testing before using it up!

[Scott Shepherd]

Titanium engraves black using pretty fast, multiple passes with a small hatch distance. Kev's right on with the 80KHz range. The more passes the darker it gets, to a point. It will look jet black from straight on and a bluish hue from other angles. It's a beautiful material to work with. We did a job that had a logo with their company name and the American flag. We engraved their name in black, the flag in what looked blue and the stripes red. Sorry for the poor quality photo, it's a little fuzzy where I wasn't holding the camera still when I took it. It looks blurry but it was razor sharp and very small fonts.

Here's a few titanium pieces.

On the scales, those fonts are about .050" tall for reference.
353419353420353421

[John Kleiber]

Kev,

I am not sure if light or dark is preferred in the engraving finished product.

Looks like the knife maker brand is KIZER which on the internet is a 200.00 +/- knife, I need to test before committing to the deal.

With that said, I just got of the phone with a local scrap yard that has a thousand lbs of Titanium scrap in stock. Guy says come pick out whatever I want, .65 a pound.

I will go get scrap and do some testing first.

I will see what your suggested settings produce and let post the outcome.

While am there I intend on asking them about metal purity and %'s. I know they have a metal tester, so maybe they can tell me.

Thanks
John

[Gary Hair]

Nice work!


Titanium engraves black using pretty fast, multiple passes with a small hatch distance. Kev's right on with the 80KHz range. The more passes the darker it gets, to a point. It will look jet black from straight on and a bluish hue from other angles. It's a beautiful material to work with. We did a job that had a logo with their company name and the American flag. We engraved their name in black, the flag in what looked blue and the stripes red. Sorry for the poor quality photo, it's a little fuzzy where I wasn't holding the camera still when I took it. It looks blurry but it was razor sharp and very small fonts.

Here's a few titanium pieces.

On the scales, those fonts are about .050" tall for reference.
353419353420353421

[Lyle Cheredaryk]

I found this info in an Interweb search for marking Titanium. I hope it helps.
It's from Epilog.353425

[Tim Bateson]

I agree with Steve (Scott). My results have been about the same as his. Hard to mess up Titanium. Even if you don't get a good Black, you may get Blue or Purple. Did that a couple times & the customers loved the uniqueness of it.

[Scott Shepherd]

Nice work!

Thanks Gary, much appreciated.

[John Kleiber]

Well I acquired some Titanium scrap from the scrap yard down the road. This is $4.00 worth at .65 per lbs.
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I cut off a flat titanium piece and ran some tests earlier today.
My 50w Fiber at 1500 speed, 5% power the laser just danced around (see upper right corner) in below image.
I kept adjusting until I got some traction. After I could see a mark appear, I gradually made changes down the row.

353562

x = loop
s = speed
p = power

All testing at .06

Its hard to tell in the image, but a polished bright look at 1x 300s 30p 50Khz .06 seemed to be the brightest.
1x 200s 30p 70Khz was nice also because it looked gold.

On the dark spectrum 1x 300s 100p 40Khz looked the darkest with a smoother feel.

So far I have no luck in producing Gary's super black results. Am I way off on my settings?

In the meantime I will adjust Line Spacing from .06 down progressively to .01 to see what happens.

I think a black mark looks the best, if I could only get there.

-John

[Scott Shepherd]

John, read what I wrote with my photos. Don't try to do it in 1 pass. Also, your hatch distance is too great. It should be about .001-.002" of an inch for something like that. .002" should be fine. Convert that to metric if you need to. Take multiple fast passes and it will go dark. It might take 5 passes to get dark, but they are pretty fast speed passes. What you will get is a mark that is dark and you can't feel with your fingernail. To me, it looks like you are really frying it. That's just too much power/too slow speed for what you are trying to accomplish. You want a mark on the surface not a removal of metal.

I don't recall any settings, but I would say you want 80KHz, 100% power, maybe 30 inches in the speed (whatever that converts to in metric), and maybe 5 or even as many as 8 passes. Get the KHz up, get the power and passes up, and the mark will go darker every pass. Try it.

[John Kleiber]

John, read what I wrote with my photos. Don't try to do it in 1 pass. Also, your hatch distance is too great. It should be about .001-.002" of an inch for something like that. .002" should be fine. Convert that to metric if you need to. Take multiple fast passes and it will go dark. It might take 5 passes to get dark, but they are pretty fast speed passes. What you will get is a mark that is dark and you can't feel with your fingernail. To me, it looks like you are really frying it. That's just too much power/too slow speed for what you are trying to accomplish. You want a mark on the surface not a removal of metal.

I don't recall any settings, but I would say you want 80KHz, 100% power, maybe 30 inches in the speed (whatever that converts to in metric), and maybe 5 or even as many as 8 passes. Get the KHz up, get the power and passes up, and the mark will go darker every pass. Try it.

haha, I just read your thread and it matches my latest idea. Increase resolution and increase passes.

I got to thinking about the gold color and sure enough, more passes makes the gold darker and darker.

Need to do a lot of fine tuning to get consistent color at angles. Good news though, there is no feel when fingernail scratched.

353577
Its black head on, but a tiny bit of red and blue when viewed from an angle.

I know with the depth of the other marks it seems like I am trying to go deep. In testing, I was trying everything in an effort to understand other engraving possibilities.
I'm interested in combining methods, like deep engraving first, then following up with a final marking black to give it "pop".

Thanks John

[Scott Shepherd]

Get your power and speed up. Do 100% power, .05 hatch distance, 500-600 speed if it will go that fast. Use your power to make it go faster. No need to throttle it back to 30%. Oh, and get it up to 80KHz.

[Scott Shepherd]

I went back and checked some settings, looks like 60KHz was the sweet spot, not 80KHz. Sorry about that, was doing it from memory and should have checked first.

[John Kleiber]

I went back and checked some settings, looks like 60KHz was the sweet spot, not 80KHz. Sorry about that, was doing it from memory and should have checked first.

Thank you for the correction.

2 things happen when I increase power or speed;

If I increase power beyond 50% I get sparks and I can tell its removing material, not annealing.
353653

If I increase speed beyond 700 I start to get laser trace marks where the laser is not stopping soon enough and leaves a lased track of its path.
353654

If I decrease 70Khz the mark gets lighter. I have also tried 80Khz on up to 125 Khz. As I look through a 20x magnifier, with Khz progressively increased, black seems to dominate with less and less instances of blue or red.


Argh... and now the customer shows up unannounced with the knife....

Well its only 4 letters. Maybe I can find a tiny hidden spot to test.
353655

[John Kleiber]

Everyone,

I just wanted to say thanks for the guidance. This was an extremely small knife marking project and was my first encounter with Titanium.

The titanium marked black with a ever so slight hint of blue. Since the handle was a gray with a hint of blue, it matched really well.

Just 4 letters on a titanium handle...

353920353922

Several hours of testing, just for 4 letters. But I know how to now.

Crazy thing about this, the knifes Titanium handle was far more forgiving than the scrap I was testing on.

-John

[Scott Shepherd]

Well done John, thanks for sharing.

[Gary Hair]

Nicely done! 4+ hours for a $35 job? Not go great. The education you received? Priceless!