Kev Williams
03-15-2020, 2:32 AM
I have 3 fibers, and between them I have 220, 150, and 70mm (work area) lenses. Never had a 100-ish mm lens until today, ordered a 110 off ebay, a whole $69...
The 70 I ordered for a one-off job, which required shaving over existing engraving and replacing it with readable new engraving, in 2 places on 1600 aluminum parts. It worked wonderfully, but with only a 2.3" working area I haven't had much other use for it. But man, that small a focal-length lens has a LOT more beam spot power density than my other lenses.
So I got the new lens installed, found the focal point, then engraved TEST on one of my aluminum hold-down's...
427963
427964
Check out the depth! It's 1/4" tall Arial font, nothing special, except that with my longer lenses it would take a around 5 to 8 three x-hatch passes and a minute give or take to get this depth. The new lens did this in 2 passes and 23 seconds, fresh out of the box! That's at least .003" legal ATF depth, probably closer to .005"...
It's not real purty engraving, didn't run any cleanup passes, but that's easy enough. Got similar results on a mirror finish SS switchplate running the exact same settings, not quite as deep but close, and a lot of slag along the edges, so some fine tuning is in order the harder metals.
Couldn't get it to anneal, yet- with the lens in focus, running a .001 to .003 hatch, ZERO power and ANY kHz between 20 and 100, it ablates like crazy. It will take some serious out-of-focus adjusting to anneal, so much so that I'll have to change the focal distance in the F3 settings to adjust the engraving size.
I give up several inches of work area, but for gun barrels, slides and most of the industrial parts I get 110mm is plenty of room.
Pretty significant change for $70, I'm happy! :D
The 70 I ordered for a one-off job, which required shaving over existing engraving and replacing it with readable new engraving, in 2 places on 1600 aluminum parts. It worked wonderfully, but with only a 2.3" working area I haven't had much other use for it. But man, that small a focal-length lens has a LOT more beam spot power density than my other lenses.
So I got the new lens installed, found the focal point, then engraved TEST on one of my aluminum hold-down's...
427963
427964
Check out the depth! It's 1/4" tall Arial font, nothing special, except that with my longer lenses it would take a around 5 to 8 three x-hatch passes and a minute give or take to get this depth. The new lens did this in 2 passes and 23 seconds, fresh out of the box! That's at least .003" legal ATF depth, probably closer to .005"...
It's not real purty engraving, didn't run any cleanup passes, but that's easy enough. Got similar results on a mirror finish SS switchplate running the exact same settings, not quite as deep but close, and a lot of slag along the edges, so some fine tuning is in order the harder metals.
Couldn't get it to anneal, yet- with the lens in focus, running a .001 to .003 hatch, ZERO power and ANY kHz between 20 and 100, it ablates like crazy. It will take some serious out-of-focus adjusting to anneal, so much so that I'll have to change the focal distance in the F3 settings to adjust the engraving size.
I give up several inches of work area, but for gun barrels, slides and most of the industrial parts I get 110mm is plenty of room.
Pretty significant change for $70, I'm happy! :D