Subtle Power Loss in ULS X100

[Julio Carreon-Reyes]

Greetings Forum,

Quick scenario for your consideration:

I had my tube (COHERENT G100, 100w) serviced and returned, I placed into the machine (ULS X100), aligned it sufficiently, and enjoyed 2+ weeks of optimal cutting + rastering.

Then a few things happened in close proximity to each other.

Last week I noticed that the belt for the X axis was hanging a bit loose, unable to find the tensioner near the idler, I loosened the belt connection at the cutting head, pulled the belt tight (but not too tight, just no longer hanging away from the track), and reattached everything. The same night we had a 'cold' front and the temp in studio might have reached 33 F / not quite freezing (I am in Central Tejas, and it almost never freezes here). Finally, I think I overloaded the machine's memory with a particularly dense file (lots of vector lines + large amounts of rastering). The effect of this final move was to cause the laser to quit unexpectedly while cutting. I was able to address this last problem via clearing the machine's file cache and sending the same file at a lower resolution and I have not experienced the 'quitting' effect since.


While I have experienced no loss in accuracy, the laser does not raster / cut as effectively as it did before. None of my saved settings work nearly as well as they did last week. I am cutting / rastering ply (1/8" and 1/4") and the 100w was doing great for this application. Now I am barley able to cut 1/8" reliably and I can get similar raster effects but I have to slow the machine way down.

Could a slight over-tightening of the x-axis belt contribute to this?
Is it a driver or firmware issue? I am using COREL DRAW to drive the laser, but I do all of my work in ILLUSTRATOR and there have been some translation issues.
The easiest answer seems to be the tube is leaking, but EVERGREEN had it leak tested for days before sending back to me (and it was working great for a while). Could the cold (33F) temp have affected the seal on the tube?

Any ideas?
Many thanks for your input on this.
Happy Holidays,
Julio

[Steve Kelsey]

Did you clean your mirrors and lenses after working on it?

[Julio Carreon-Reyes]

Steve,
Thanks for the response. Yes, I did do a round of optics cleaning as part of the initial trouble shooting.

[Rangarajan Saravana kumar]

i guess alignment in the machine mirror and lens is required...

regards

[George Brown]

At least on my laser, ULS states that the tube should not be stored at a temperature below 50F or the seal could leak.