Need Help

[Daniel Hamilton]

I have been fighting with my friends laser for almost two weeks now

can anyone tell me what would cause this... i have aligned the laser almost 15 times, cleaned every lense mirror everything...

me and my associate are getting to the point of fed up

it's a Accuris Powersharp 12 30w

[matt heinzel]

What are you trying to do?

[Daniel Hamilton]

those were just test burns of a solid white block, do you see the horizontal / vertical lines in everything?

[matt heinzel]

Oh wow I see. I guess that is really beyond me. Have you tried to engrave something similar on another type of material?

[Scott Shepherd]

Looks like banding to me. I can't tell for sure, since I don't know the orientation of each burn. Can you verify how they were burned? When burned, are the lines always horizontal, vertical, or both?

If it's vertical, then it would appear to me (without seeing more than you have shown in the photo), that it's banding. There are some things that will make banding lessen, but in some cases, you can't get rid of it. Things that can help that are not hardware related are to convert the "black" in the image to some shade of gray, like 90% or 95%. It'll stop trying to burn the entire mass out and make it a burn made up of a lot of little dots that might be acceptable to you.

Try that 90% gray thing and let us know if that resolves anything.

Just my best guess at the moment.

[Darren Null]

Also, for large areas, you can defocus a smidgeon and crank the power up a bit. Or try 3 fast passes instead of one slow one.

[George D Gabert]

On our plasma machines we see this type of nonlinearity if the encodes or gears are dirty. Binding and freeing. Also see if there is play in the bearings.

GDG

[Daniel Hamilton]

they were all burned with the lines facing left to right, all different speed settings.. ( speed setting were written in sharpie on the block ... dose it for all materials all settings I've tried in the program, manufacturer is stumped wants to send the laser back to get fixed... can't afford that much downtime let alone the amount of shipping

[Frank Corker]

Maybe the stepper motors are not running as smoothly as they should be.

[Bruce Volden]

Daniel,

I would be interested in seeing if it does this in a greyscale mode! Can you drop the color to a shade of grey and experiment on a small area? I am wondering if the "dots" line up in a similar fashion???

Bruce

[Daniel Hamilton]

i'm buring something right now as a test, after that i'll try what you suggested...

run it in grayscale as a black square as it is now?

[Scott Shepherd]

Not a black square, but a 90% gray square, yes.

[martin g. boekers]

OK this will sound real stupid, but I have had all sorts of strange things happen
when I didn't use laserable material, so double check if the plastic that you are using is designed to be lasered.

Marty

[martin g. boekers]

One more thing, the computer I use a laser on also prints to a dye sub printer . If you use your computer for different output devices make sure the proper boxes are checked, so you aren't sending a profile to the laser

Marty

[Daniel Hamilton]

the item in the picture is anodized aluminum, i use it all the time, nothing new

this computer is hooked to one printer, and one printer only, it's the "laser computer"

[Scott Shepherd]

Did you try the 90% black (or gray) yet? If so, any results to report back?