Fibre laser with moveable bed- queries

[John Lifer]

I am engraving and cutting out 1/16" acrylic. Setting up for 4 up on my laser. Mainly text, and it is spread out a good bit. Like a 1" letter then 3" horizontally to next letter, and then a bunch in direct center. So about 8" between the plates that has a gap.
I initially set up and RDworks said 34 minutes for the 4. And then today I mapped the text into 4 sections. Time is now 23 minutes. Over a third less time. (can't speed up the cutting any more and it was 5 minutes of the total.)
Mapped left side, mapped right side separately.

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

Thanks, Kev and John.
Kev, I'm not able to see those JPGs - I'm guessing I have to pay now to see photos posted here?

I have since tried some 'mapping' of areas, and tested both machines- chinese and ULS.

The weird thing is with the 9"x4" plaques, the ULS was way quickler when I ran multiple vector inlines, and no rastering- 18 minutes- as opposed to 28 minutes was the best I could do rastering, while the Chinese big laser would raster in 24 minutes, but took 58 minutes to do them as thorough vectors- mainly fue the the slow speed curve settings I put in to maintain accuracy in that machine.

BUT when I tried the new 1/4 size option they now want, 4.5" x 2", the chinese machine can raster them way more quickly (8:05 min each) than the ULS can vector cut them (14 mins)- despite me generating new multiple inline vectors

That is running the ULS @ 500 ppi/dpi, and running the Chinese one at 0.05mm scan gap- or near enough to 500 ppi- 20 lines per mm, to get a good black on Cermark.

Kev, I did think about vector-cutting the snake, but there was so much text, that the head was going to be travelling over most areas anyway.
Thanks, though- yes 180 mm/s has been OK also.

[Kev Williams]

So cough up your $6 already!

in the meantime--

the plates-


the settings-




==========
and-- you should try vectoring the snake, seriously, as text lines will only engrave text lines, whereas text plus snake, you'll likely run the gantry with the laser OFF more often than ON..

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

Quote: "...whereas text plus snake, you'll likely run the gantry with the laser OFF more often than ON.."

Good point-thank you. (I can be a bit slow at times!)