Help with Tools

[Kathy Moore]

Can any of you engravers share your secrets for engraving on forged steel wrenches?
I want to put the owners name on his wrenches and sockets. What settings should I use?
These are large industrial wrenches. I have Cermark Spray and Tape. So far I have had no luck. HELPPPPP
Thanks Kathy

[Dan Hintz]

For 60W, you'll be in the 25S/100P range.

[Kathy Moore]

Thank You Dan
I am having a terrible time with this engraving issue. There are a few canned settings in my software but when customers bring me stuff in off the street, It is hard to know where to go with it. Your help is very much appreciated.
Kathy

[Richard Rumancik]

Kathy, I am afraid that you will have to keep experimenting to get a handle on your settings. I have had very little success in using other people's settings and tabulated values from the manufacturer. Generally, my approach for rastering Cermark would be to start at P=100% and guess at the speed eg. 50%. If that doesn't work, go up or down say 20%. Then keep refining (cutting the difference in half) till you get something you are happy with. eg for a specific material you try P=100%, S=50%. Let's say the Cermark doesn't stick well, so you need more heat. Reduce speed to say 20%. It sticks really well, but you think perhaps you are overheating. Then go between 20 and 50 maybe 35%. You have to balance time spent optimizing with payback. If only a few parts, don't worry if it takes a bit longer than needed. If you are doing 1000, it pays to find the threshold (between what works and what doesn't) and then add some safety factor to ensure 100% yield.

Dan's ULS and your Epilog may work similar for marking, but they don't for cutting. So be careful when using other machine's settings.

[Dan Hintz]

Richard's correct, Kathy, you will always want to run your own power grids as whatever settings we suggest will only put you in the ballpark... but it helps to be in the ballpark than guessing wildly.

[Richard Rumancik]

Kathy, it really isn't that bad to take a new material that you know nothing about and zero in on plausible settings, although somebody's initial setting might save one trial. For both vector and raster, I try to use 100% power if the material doesn't object (i.e. if there is too great a heat-affected zone, discoloration, edge rise, warpage, etc then I reduce power). For Cermark I think you can use 100% power for anything. So 100% is normally my starting point. After using the laser for a while, your first guess of speed will be within 5-20% so after that it is successive divisions and you can get close quickly. You can set up a test file using colors and do 5 or more tests or so at a time using color mapping (just a short cut or a small patch of raster). Once you are close then you can do more detailed tests (e.g. I usually check vectoring on a circle not a straight line as my laser has more trouble getting through on curves.) Also it helps to have some test items around (like old knives) that you can experiment on. And keep good records of what you do. Again, for a small run, don't waste too much time optimizing as it makes no sense calibrating for an hour to save ten minutes laser time.

[Larry Bratton]

Kathy:
All of the above is good advice, but I have always used and had good success with the recommended settings in the Epilog manual. These have proven to be good in many cases, but I start there and experiment.