Need help with Stippling Sig Sauer

[Peter Gardella]

I need some help finding some settings for laser stippling Sig Sauer frames. I have a Boss 30w fiber FMD. I’m struggling to find my settings to make the polymer vaporize instead of melt and turn into a burning bubbling mess. I know it can be done, but I’m hoping to avoid costing myself hundreds of dollars in frames. I know a lot of people don’t like to give out settings, but I’ll give out my settings for Glocks, Rugers, and Pmags. I just don’t care and I would gladly help someone out if they help me out.

[Frank Piatek]

I to would like to know if anyone wants to share ideas. Engraving firearms is a pretty closed market and any "secrets" wouldn't go to far.

[Peter Gardella]

I’ll start. For black pmags, on my 30w fiber, I use 5000 mm/s, 16% pwr, 70 kHz, and 0.02 line spacing, and a cross hatch. For FDE I use 1000 mm/s, 75% pwr, 20 kHz and line spacing of 0.08, and a cross hatch. The line spacing is critical with the FDE. Anything smaller and I just kept burning the material. 0.08 seemed to work the best.

[Frank Piatek]

Thanks Peter. We appreciate the top secret info being shared 😂 . Hopefully we can get a more people to share their findings to build a stronger fiber laser gun engraving community!

[John Lifer]

Increase your line width (Ive tried up to .1mm on some black glock cheapo imports) One batch that I did came out almost white engraving, the next an so far all the rest is a dirty grey. And Yep, I kept one mag that I have gone back and it IS the material, not the laser (or me) Good luck with the Sig, I've only been successful with a true glock BLACK. And I posted my setting a couple of months back. (search)

[Kev Williams]

First- just want to point out that all machines are different, please take that into account when borrowing settings :) And when it comes to speed settings, the lens you're using comes into play. Longer lens are capable of higher speeds due to the engraved length-to-mirrors-moving-distance ratio... Like, I have a 100mm lens with a 70mm working area, less than 3", so the mirrors have to move their full travel just to engrave a 2-3/4" line! These things are fast but they're limited on how fast they can move the mirrors at both full speed and full travel. I'm not even sure 5000mm/sec is even do-able with this lens. But going to the other extreme, like with my new 420mm lens with a 300mm working area (at least), I just got it tuned up, for this lens to engrave a 2-3/4" line only about 1/5 the total mirror's movement is necessary. And whatever speed is capable with my 100mm lens, 5x that speed is capable with the 420mm-! I'm assuming the software compensates for speed by virtue of the lens size entered into EzCad. What I don't know is, if my machine can run 6000mm/sec with a 150 lens, will let my 420 lens run at 16,800? Actually, I have no clue, never had time to experiment ;) --I'm just saying, the possibility is there...

And another issue with lens choice, long lenses will have a slightly wider laser beam width. Not much, but the narrower it is, the hotter it will be...

And, if you guys have never tried the wobble, you need to mess with it :D For those who haven't- draw 1" black square and find some scrap metal. With black chosen, unclick 'use default param', go down below the settings and click the 'advance' button-- find and click the 'wobble' check box, then set the diameter to 2.00mm, and the distance to .05mm. Click OK, then set your speed to 100, power to 10 and freq to 30. Press go and watch what happens :) Note that you can wobble your hatch fills... When it's done, change the diameter to .2mm and the distance to 2mm, and run it again and see what you get. - The right wobble dia and distance running very fast at low power and high freq may get you what you're looking for...

[Bill George]

What Kevin is saying is very true, every fiber machine is different. You can't expect to buy a machine, put it on the table and expect someone to give you settings that work. When I had mine I also started a log book and spent a few weeks experimenting and logging settings... for my machine. Its not "top secret" its called learning.

The other secret is the Search function, there is a ton of info here on learning the fiber laser.