RayFine Engraving Speed

[Steven Taitinger]

To any of the RayFine machine users, what speed do you typically engrave at? Does your machine follow the 100 mm/s listed on their website here (http://www.rayfinetech.com/product/product57.html)? That seems like a typo when their 900x600 machine lists 1000 mm/s.

Edit
This seems to be answered in my other post.

[John Noell]

In case anyone real new comes to this point, the engraving speed you should use is totally dependent on the material, the effect you want, and how quickly you need to run a job (e.g., perhaps sacrificing a bit of quality for faster speeds giving shorter run times). Unless you only use one material for one purpose, there is no "typical engraving speed." It has almost nothing to do with the machine you are using.

[Kev Williams]

Compared to RF aka Western lasers, DC glass lasers are extremely slow to react. I liken the difference to how fast LED lights achieve full-brightness compared to incandescent lights... we never new how slow plain old light bulbs were until they started putting LED brake lights on cars! ;) While the difference in lasers may not be quite so dramatic, the difference is similar in that a DC laser can't 'light up' as fast as an RF laser...

I engrave a lot of anodized aluminum with my 80w Triumph, and it's capable of 1000mm/sec.. However, I've found that up to around the 'typical' 500mm/sec speed, engraving quality is very good. But once I start heading above 500, the engraving quality starts to suffer, and IMO is simply because of the laser's reaction time. Adding more power can partially help, but it does nothing to clean up the raggly vertical edges that start appearing when engraving at high speeds.

I have great results at 500, so anything up to that speed you can get away with in relation to power, I think you'll be okay.

Another anomaly with higher speeds on Chinese lasers is the overrun on the ends as the laser stops to change direction, the faster you tell the machine to go, the farther the overrun. With this in mind, if you're engraving 4" across in the X axis, running at 200 speed may be faster than 500 simply because of the much shorter overrun... try it! :)