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Thread: Fiber laser not staying in the lines with hatching.

  1. #1

    Fiber laser not staying in the lines with hatching.

    Hi guys,

    Been lurking around leading up to and after my fiber laser purchase although this is my first post. I actually love my fiber, my only issue is the requests I get strain to the edges of what is possible with it.

    I've been doing some work on aluminum flashing for testing. My laser is "coloring outside the lines" for lack of a better term. Kind of like a drop shadow. Photos attached.

    I'm hoping this related to speed or hatch settings. It's not on every single outline but definitely the text. Some of this text was traced in Inkscape and some was placed in EZCAD so it's not my image editor. Anyone familiar with this issue and know settings I can play around with.

    20190430_171927.jpg
    20190430_171932.jpg
    20190430_172116.jpg

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Location
    Suwanee, GA
    Posts
    3,686
    There are two things coming into play here - slag, and start/stop settings. Slag is the haze or residue left from ablating the material, much like soot on wood. You can clean up after or you can adjust your settings to eliminate or reduce the slag. Usually high speed and low power will yield the cleanest engraving, but sometimes you need to blast through to get deep in a short amount of time. Your pics don't show much of this but there is some. For the start/stop settings Kev is your man - he has played with them enough to know way more than I do about how to get them optimized. About all I can tell you is to adjust one or the other up and/or down and check the results, Kev may have specific advice based on your pics.

  3. #3
    Thanks Gary. I've run into a lot of your posts throughout my research (I recognize the sig).

    So around the letters you believe some of this could be slag and some material processing/clean up could help here?

    I haven't messed with the start stop settings yet myself. I may have to do some playing around with these. I should've known it would be more complicated than just offsetting the hatch a bit >.<

  4. #4
    With the software that came with your machine should be a PDF titled 'EzCad 2.10 software'. Myself, I also received printed copies... If you have one or both versions, open it, and roll down to page 22 (actual page 18), this is where the hatch fills are explained. Learn about offsets... Way down on page 123 (actual page 119) that's where the explanations of the laser's start & stop settings reside, and how to make adjustments to compensate for your issues. Making adjustments can take awhile, but it's well worth it in getting pristine engraving. Another benefit that you can adjust for is the actual engraving time... The basic settings contain start & stop laser timing of 4 different parameters, and these time changes can be in the hundreds of milliseconds, for every start/stop switchback of a hatch routine! It doesn't take long for those milliseconds to add up to full seconds! Some of my first jobs are saved using my newer machine's factory settings, and my adjusted settings not only result in better engraving, they also cut the engraving time down dramatically...
    ========================================
    ELEVEN - rotary cutter tool machines
    FOUR - CO2 lasers
    THREE- make that FOUR now - fiber lasers
    ONE - vinyl cutter
    CASmate, Corel, Gravostyle


  5. #5
    Thanks for all the advice. This specific issue was solved by changing the hatching method. I had the "dashed" method chosen. Changing it to any other method took the shadowing away.

    I'm sure the issue still resides with my start/stop settings but having a quick fix was nice. Once I get through this initial project I'll be able to really dig in and get everything configured correctly

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