Speeding up your fiber

[Kev Williams]

I have a repeat job, etching a logo onto clear anodized aluminum parts. The logo is about 10" long, so it's 2 setups. The logo has some very fat lettering and a design that connects between 2 letters. I've been getting these parts 6 to 10 at a time, about 5 times last year. The logo must be bright white. My cut routine: 45 and 135 'fast' hatches at .05 space, 1500 speed, 100 power 40 freq, and a 90° 'quality' pass at .04, 1500/100/80. They come out bright white...

Part 1 of the logo was taking 1:10 to engrave, and part 2 took 1:59, so 3:09 plus 'the turn' plus in & out. I've been using a piece of scrap Rowmark engraved with the outline of the logo, to place on the part and redlight its engraving for placement. Part 1 involved redlighting half the logo, part 2 I just redlighted one letter to get the spacing right. So 3:09 plus about 15 seconds for the turn, plus maybe 20 seconds to re-align the next part and start, so basically 3 minutes 45 seconds per piece. For what it is and what I'm charging, that's fine for 10 pieces.

So the other day I get 50 of these things. 50 x 3.75 minutes = 187 minutes, so about 3 hours 7 minutes to run 50 of these things...

What I did: the quality hatch must fully sweep objects, including dead air space, which can eat lots of time. In the logo where the shape connected to 2 letters, I found a spot to cut it apart and make it 2 pieces. Sweeping the 2 halves, because of their overall shapes, went a LOT faster. I also took hatch angle of the cleanup pass into consideration, running a 90 angle meant less overlapped segments to sweep, which saved more time. So once the hatch routine seemed optimized, I then increased the hatch spacing to .06mm for all 3 hatches, and increased the speed from 1500 to 2000.

The end result was I cut part 1 from 1:10 down to 40 seconds, and part 2 from 1:59 down to 1:19, so near exactly 2 minutes, vs 3:09, over 1/3 time cut!

I also setup a temporary table (and old shelf :) ) with some stops clamped on, so once the first part was lined up and done right in both halves, the alignment procedure for the remaining parts was basically gone, so the 35 seconds of turnaround and switch out got whittled down to around 10 seconds..

So by tweaking the laser settings a bit and using table stops to cut down setup time, instead of 3 hours 7 minutes to finish, with a few tweaks I got it down to roughly 1 hour 35 minutes... almost half! And the engraving quality is identical to the slower way.

Not only did this nearly double my hourly pay, it also left me free to work on other jobs an hour and a half sooner, double bonus! :D

[Scott Shepherd]

Good job Kev! The settings are a beast. I compare it to solving a complex puzzle. It's all trial and error. I have some larger text jobs and have found the the lazy way is to highlight all the text and engrave it. It does long passes. Then I changed that and would make every line of text it's own color. It was much faster.

[John Lifer]

It is amazing how you can tweek and cut lots of time off these things. I DO like your idea Scott of multiple lines of text in different colors. Free space is a definite time waster.

Kev I assume you are using 'Mark Selected' to do the two sections? Or using two files?

[Kev Williams]

I ALWAYS have 'mark selected' checked, it's the first thing I do when starting the program. I keep all kinds of crap on screen; notes to myself, pieces I move, old pieces for reference, so I HAVE to 'mark selected' or I make a mess!

As for the 2 selections, there's 2 ways to go about it, one is to superimpose the 2 sections on top of each other and hatch/group them individually; select the left-side engraving, run it, move the part, select the right side engraving and run that- next part start with the right, then the left... 2nd way, which is less confusing, is to keep the 2 sections together as per original, then jog the sections. In last night's job I had the jog set to 110mm, with the left half on screen, run, jog it and the part left, then run the right side... Now it sounds like all the jogging would be time consuming-- and it is-- but the fix for that is the 'undo/redo' buttons. Click to group the left section, then ungroup, group both sections and move them left, then click to group the right section- now hit the undo button, which will ungroup, hit undo again, it will slide everything back, AND THE LEFT SIDE WILL BE GROUPED- now hit the REDO button, it will slide back again, now group the right half... from then on, undo puts the left half in position and grouped, and redo will ready the right section. Superimposed is easier, but sometimes, depending on what's being engraved, remembering which side is which can be confusing. I set my BIL up on a 2-part job I superimposed, he did 2 parts right, did the 3rd part backwards.. ;)

As for lines of text different colors to optimize, you don't actually need to change colors, just group and hatch each line individually, the machine will engrave your hatched groups in the order you created them; saves setup time since you don't have to create a new hatch color for each line :)