My parents have a VLS2.30, nice simple 30 watt desktop laser. When they first got it it seemed to be working fine, but then it was moved twice and sat unused for about 8 months. They tried getting it up and running again last week and it wasn't working too well so I went home this past weekend to help. I will likely be visiting again this weekend so if I can get some advice on anything that can be tried before then I'd appreciate it.
Long story short: When putting a simple raster through (ie, plain black text) it only does the outline of the text. This makes no sense to me. It is a raster, there is no vector, how is it not filling in? I watched it, it goes back and forth as it's supposed to, I can see the beam on the material as it goes all the way across but when I take it out to look it isn't filled in.
By tweaking the power and speed I was able to get better results but still not perfect: thinner parts (like the vertical line of a 'T') come out fine but the wide parts (like the horizontal line of the same 'T') don't get filled in, even though I can see that the laser is firing the entire duration. If this explanation doesn't make sense I'll try to demonstrate it by etching a plain black triangle this weekend.
To begin with the alignment was off: I found some instructions that told me to use some tape to get it dead centre and I did that, but after fixing the alignment there was another thing I noticed which may or may not be expected/related: with the carriage in the lower right corner (furthest distance from the laser), the "test laser" step puts a nice black dot right in the middle of the tape. In the upper left corner (shortest distance from the laser) it burns a hole clean through. I need to cut the power (from 20% to 15%) to get the same just black dot result. Is that supposed to be the case, that this apparent difference in power depending on where the carriage is is normal and not something to worry about? Could it be directly related to my actual problem or possibly a different problem? With all the optics back in place, the focus is also wrong: the red laser is a perfect dot in one corner but becomes a blur in the opposite corner. I suspect that this may be a different problem, but it could be related.
After the alignment was fixed, I did some tests on paper, wood, and ceramic, with one line of text one inch tall. For the paper, I was not able to get a perfect result: if I increase the power or decrease the speed anymore then it was correctly filling in the wide parts but it burns clean through the narrow parts. I was able to get more-or-less good result on the wood (more on that in a minute) but the ceramic I had at 100% power and 1% speed and it still had some gaps. This same ceramic worked just fine 8 months ago.
The wood test revealed another, possibly related problem. I tweaked the settings until I was able to get good output, testing with the 1 inch tall text. I then tested with more text, filling a 4 inch space, but as it moved down the block it got lighter and lighter, going back to being hollow text halfway down.
I've been googling for days but I'm obviously not using the right words; finally reached the end of my efforts and felt I needed the input of experts. If anyone has any experience or suggestions of any kind I'd appreciate it. Does this look like an issue with the optics? A lens that isn't right? Maybe the laser itself has just worn out despite sitting unused for so long and needs to be "recharged" or whatever you do with them?
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Originally Posted by Bill George
