Spirit GE 40W Problems

[Kim Uleberg]

Hello!

My name is Kim Uleberg, I'm new to this forum, and I've read alot of good info here :-)

A friend of mine and I have a small engraving business in Norway. About 6 months ago we got the LaserPro Spirit GE 40W. And we are not happy with it at all. We used to have an old Universal 25W laser, everything worked perfectly on it...but it was slow and was starting to fail.
With the Spirit, we can't get normal Rowmark plastics to engrave properly. On White w/Black and Red w/White we have to have 2 passes for some odd reason. We never needed that on the old Universal. Believe me we have tried every setting we can think of...still need 2 passes cause 1. pass never turns out nice. For example with Red w/White...all writing engraved has alot of red residue or something in it that we can't wash away...its very strange. We are alos not happy with the vector cutting of it, not very accurate at all compared to the Universal. For example when we engrave a boxed in area on the plate we're engraving...we usually use hairline boxes with contours...its much faster then engraving the boxes themselves with outline. And there is always gaps some places in the engraved boxes.

Today we have problems with Alumamark...silver...i know this is a hard one to engrave...but this is just strange. With gold we use 50 speed and 15 power...works well...it didn't with silver...we have tried every setting you can think of now and the nicest one is speed 100 power 1...which i thought wouldn't even leave a mark...we contacted the people we bought it from...and they can't understand it...there must be something wrong somewhere. The engraving is nice and dark on either side of a word...but the middle is faded for some reason...the plate itself is straight...we tried it in different areas of the plate with same result.

I've been rambling for a while now...just a little frustrated. Wanted to see if any of you had some tips or have experienced any of the same problems.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
We're now considering getting a new Universal and getting rid of this one...the new Universal Industrial looks interesting :-) but it's not out till next year which is a shame.

Thanx for any respond :-)

Kim c",)

[Dan Hintz]

Gaps lead me to believe there might be something wrong with the hardware side of the laser control itself. Make sure the power supply is in good working condition, and all connections to the tube are solid and arc-free. If the tube is PWM controlled, make sure the PWM control line is not intermittent.

[Scott Challoner]

Iv'e had a 30W Spirit for about a year now and for the most part, I'm very happy with it. I thought it was interesting that you mentioned the poor engraving of Rowmark materials though. I had the same problem, but without any other machine to compare it to, I assumed it was normal. One thing that helped a little was to engrave from bottom to top. That way, the exhaust isn't dragging freshly laserd (hot) material across the already engraved part. I also thought about possibly using the top exhaust port thinking it would draw the waste material up rather than accross the Rowmark. I don't do a lot of plastic engraving so I never tried it.
As far as the Alumamark problem... I don't use this much either, but I wonder if it's related to the ghosting problem I had on Laser LIGHT material. Just a hunch, but it sounds like the middle would be faint because the head has ramped up to full speed where the ends are ramping up or down. With Synrad tubes, you may need to reduce the frequency of the trickle pulse. There is a procedure how to do it on your laserpro website or the people you bought it from should be able to tell you how to do it (it's quite easy).

Hope this helps.

[Bill Cunningham]

The residue on plastic can be removed with a rag slightly damp with Alcohol, takes it right off... I get nice solid black results with Silver Alumamark by using 25 power, and 30 speed on the Epilog.. Just did 3 - 2 x 6" plates for a racing team today, and they came of great.. The Alumamark site has a .pdf with processing info,
http://www.alumamark.com/am_trouble.pdf
but some of it seems to be way out of wack.. i.e. the 35 watt TT only requires 10% power, while the 40 and 75 requires 25% ?? One thing I did discover is that it 'has' to be done at a minimum of 600 dpi or you wont get good results at all

[Mike Hood]

That chart is whacked :)

On mine I usually use something along the lines of 100% power, 65-70% speed, and 600ppi. Slowing down the speed to get the depth I need and then increasing the PPI sometimes to get coloring to settle.

I keep the power up and vary the speed and have great luck.

(also use 1000 dpi on my smaller text)

[Rodne Gold]

If you are having problems with vector engraving boxes composing of offset contours , it sounds like a ramping problem or wrong setting re ramping or vector quality. Do you find the corners of the boxes deeper than the sides?
Or are your "gaps" between contour lines - if so decrease the distance of the offsets or run slightly out of focus.
We run 3 spirits and have no such problems

[Kim Uleberg]

Iv'e had a 30W Spirit for about a year now and for the most part, I'm very happy with it. I thought it was interesting that you mentioned the poor engraving of Rowmark materials though. I had the same problem, but without any other machine to compare it to, I assumed it was normal. One thing that helped a little was to engrave from bottom to top. That way, the exhaust isn't dragging freshly laserd (hot) material across the already engraved part. I also thought about possibly using the top exhaust port thinking it would draw the waste material up rather than accross the Rowmark. I don't do a lot of plastic engraving so I never tried it.
As far as the Alumamark problem... I don't use this much either, but I wonder if it's related to the ghosting problem I had on Laser LIGHT material. Just a hunch, but it sounds like the middle would be faint because the head has ramped up to full speed where the ends are ramping up or down. With Synrad tubes, you may need to reduce the frequency of the trickle pulse. There is a procedure how to do it on your laserpro website or the people you bought it from should be able to tell you how to do it (it's quite easy).

Hope this helps.

We have been talking about trying out the top exhaust. Maybe even using both at the same time to get extra ventilation.
I will look into the frequency of the trickle pulse. Thank you :-)




The residue on plastic can be removed with a rag slightly damp with Alcohol, takes it right off... I get nice solid black results with Silver Alumamark by using 25 power, and 30 speed on the Epilog.. Just did 3 - 2 x 6" plates for a racing team today, and they came of great.. The Alumamark site has a .pdf with processing info,
http://www.alumamark.com/am_trouble.pdf
but some of it seems to be way out of wack.. i.e. the 35 watt TT only requires 10% power, while the 40 and 75 requires 25% ?? One thing I did discover is that it 'has' to be done at a minimum of 600 dpi or you wont get good results at all


The problem with the residue on plastic isn't ash like residue that easily comes off with a moist cloth. If we do 1 pass of engraving, no matter how much power, it seems to not take away all of the top layer for some odd reason, but only on red w/white and white w/black. And after 2 passes it's better, but still not 100%. The letters are at times also sorta "wavy" if you look closely at them. I don't find the laser to be as exact at we were hoping, or used to with the old one.
The problem we had was that we had to get as little power as possible to accually make it black. The more power we added it engraved into the material itself. Leaving just white text. The one we had with best result was 100 speed 1 power and 1000dpi cause it has smallish text




That chart is whacked :)

On mine I usually use something along the lines of 100% power, 65-70% speed, and 600ppi. Slowing down the speed to get the depth I need and then increasing the PPI sometimes to get coloring to settle.

I keep the power up and vary the speed and have great luck.

(also use 1000 dpi on my smaller text)


I don't know alot about the PPI settings, but from what I have been told I thought that only applied to when you're accually cutting material and not the engraving part itself. Thats at least what the people we got the machine from has told us. Tho they might be wrong. When we got the machine they told us they had set it all up. And everything we engraved was way off...like letters has shadows and everything just looked really poorly engraved. It turned out to be the wheels on the "head", they had put the top ones one was and the bottom ones the other way.




If you are having problems with vector engraving boxes composing of offset contours , it sounds like a ramping problem or wrong setting re ramping or vector quality. Do you find the corners of the boxes deeper than the sides?
Or are your "gaps" between contour lines - if so decrease the distance of the offsets or run slightly out of focus.
We run 3 spirits and have no such problems


No I can't see that the edges are deeper. Say we have a circle, we do a contour on the circle, offset 0,1 with 2 steps. On the laser engraving the circles don't "match" they have different paths sorta...hard to explain. The circle isn't a perfect circle, and one of the 3 passes has gone alot further up so there is a gap on top of the circle.



Maybe we should look into a different lens. We now use the 2.0 that came with the Spirit. I'm not sure what's wrong. Maybe this is just the way the machine is.
Another thig we have noticed. On the old Universal, when we engraved on steel using Cermark. The engraving was nice and black and very viewable. On the Spirit is turns out almost seethough. From some angles it looks good but if you turn it a little it's almost completely seethrough. This is really bad for us, cause we deliver ALOT of laserengraved steel.


Thank you all so much for your help :-)

Kim

[Rodne Gold]

Well , if circles dont match , you either have motion system slop or a dirty shaft encoder on the (most likely X) motor.
The rest sounds to me that the tube might be faulty - you got any way to measure the output?
Is there a GCC agent where you are who can have a look at the machine.
Did you buy it 2nd hand or new?

[Kim Uleberg]

Well , if circles dont match , you either have motion system slop or a dirty shaft encoder on the (most likely X) motor.
The rest sounds to me that the tube might be faulty - you got any way to measure the output?
Is there a GCC agent where you are who can have a look at the machine.
Did you buy it 2nd hand or new?


Thank you, we will contact the people we got it from and get them to check this out :-)
We bought it new.

Kim c",)

[Pete Andrew]

With the residue that you are finding, have you tried throwing the focus out a tiny bit, so the lasered area is less rough. I had the same (I think) problem when lasering the Rowmark reverse material - never could get a clean etched area until I threw focus out by 1-2 mm, and it worked a treat. Saves on solvents for the cleaning too!

[Kim Uleberg]

With the residue that you are finding, have you tried throwing the focus out a tiny bit, so the lasered area is less rough. I had the same (I think) problem when lasering the Rowmark reverse material - never could get a clean etched area until I threw focus out by 1-2 mm, and it worked a treat. Saves on solvents for the cleaning too!

We had the people we got the machine off over...and after a little while we tried out engraving about 1,2mm out of focus, worked great! This solved alot of issues for us, everything we engrave on it now turns out alot better. still not happy with the vector side of things...turned out we needed to go down to 2 in speed to make it look good...The only thing we can compare it to is the previous machine we had...and old universal...we had really high speeds on that with perfect results...but i guess we just have to live with that problem, untill we get a new universal at least :-)

Thank you all for your help :-)

[Pete Andrew]

I'm glad to have been of help - I'm feel I'm fairly new to this too, and it is nice to be able to feed some useful info back into the field rather than find myself always asking for help.

[Dennis Solomon]

I Have the same machine as you I have had it about a year and have been really happy with it except one time that after cleaning the first mirror I acually put it back into the wrong spot and when I ran it the next time i got some of the problems that you have mentioned when I put the mirror in the correct place then everything was great! good luck