Fiber Settings Help Please!

[Nick Marchesani]

Hi All! I'm new here and this is my first post.

I just received a 30w fiber laser and am learning how to use it. My granddaughter likes unicorns and asked me to put a unicorn on the back of a small acrylic mirror earrings. The mirror is only 1.75" long! The unicorn is detailed. I attached a pic.

I tried it on scrap pieces of acrylic mirror. I lasered the back of the mirror and am getting a bunch of lines running left to right. Is it possible to engrave something so small and detailed? If so, can you suggest settings?

Thanks!

[Kev Williams]

I'm thinking the problem is the unicorn is a BITMAP IMAGE, and the laser engraves bitmaps in raster fashion, much like a C02 gantry laser.

As to small detail:




Closeup of the upper left quadrant--



-You can even see the open spaces on most of the individual engraved sections, which means my laser is either starting an object late or ending it early, or both. But the space is so small it's insignificant except under lots of magnification.

This vector art, where every line is separately engraved. Fast-- this engraving took 19 seconds

If you can find, or covert, that unicorn into vector art, it'll look every bit as detailed as this--

[Nick Marchesani]

Hi Kevin,
Thanks for replying! I knew a Kevin Williams from Maple Shade in NJ.

I tried both bitmap and vector. The vector looked better but it still had lines. I tried a regular glass mirror with a vector and a bitmap and both came out ok the bitmap actually came out better. The image was also larger than what I need. I've been trying so many combinations of settings with the small 1.75" size and they all have lines. I actually just gave up for today.

[Nick Marchesani]

I'm thinking the problem is the unicorn is a BITMAP IMAGE, and the laser engraves bitmaps in raster fashion, much like a C02 gantry laser.

As to small detail:




Closeup of the upper left quadrant--



-You can even see the open spaces on most of the individual engraved sections, which means my laser is either starting an object late or ending it early, or both. But the space is so small it's insignificant except under lots of magnification.

This vector art, where every line is separately engraved. Fast-- this engraving took 19 seconds

If you can find, or covert, that unicorn into vector art, it'll look every bit as detailed as this--

I forgot to say.., that design looks great! I have to figure out how to get similar results. I did get better results using the wobble settings. I'm starting to think it may have something to do with an uneven amount of whatever is used on the back of acrylic mirrors?
Thanks again!

[John Lifer]

Most probably the artwork. All vector images and their conversion inside the excad software leaves a lot to be desired. I often end up with some stray lines where the vectors don't stop but are open ended.
You can't see in the initial software you are using (which I assume you are doing) but they are there when ezcad does whatever it does. Hatching is the worse.
It seems to be sometimes luck.
As I've suggested before, get a big stack of various material you anticipate using, hopefully scrap and just do all sorts of things. Most will be garbage, but all are LEARNING exercises. Save or write down your settings and you can soon get a feel for what you should try to hopefully get best results.

[Nick Marchesani]

Most probably the artwork. All vector images and their conversion inside the excad software leaves a lot to be desired. I often end up with some stray lines where the vectors don't stop but are open ended.
You can't see in the initial software you are using (which I assume you are doing) but they are there when ezcad does whatever it does. Hatching is the worse.
It seems to be sometimes luck.
As I've suggested before, get a big stack of various material you anticipate using, hopefully scrap and just do all sorts of things. Most will be garbage, but all are LEARNING exercises. Save or write down your settings and you can soon get a feel for what you should try to hopefully get best results.

Is there any software that works better?

Yesterday I spent hours trying different settings. The only one that helped was wobble. It makes the lines thicker. Maybe because the design is so detailed and being shrunk so small it's not engraving correctly? The same image when made larger engraved great it's when I shrink it down that I have the problem.

Thanks For replying!

[Bill George]

The Fiber laser is a complete learning process, there is no book or someone else's settings that are going to work the same on Your machine. Good advise has been given, get a log book and start experimenting and writing down the results. No Magic, just time and learning. I spent weeks when I first got my fiber and I had a couple years with co2 machines.

[Nick Marchesani]

Thanks Bill!

[Kev Williams]

Most probably the artwork. All vector images and their conversion inside the excad software leaves a lot to be desired. I often end up with some stray lines where the vectors don't stop but are open ended.

You might try changing your TC settings, some adjustments should end those stray lines...

These on the left I used on my Triumph for a long time, these on the right I now have all 3 machines set at...



--when I got the ebay machines I set them to the Triumph settings. But the engraving sounded funny, and some of it didn't seem as crisp as the Triumph. So I started playing around and finally ended up with the 70-135-150-85 shown, big difference! Because I transferred job files from the Triumph's computer, so came the old settings. Took me awhile to check them. Aside from from the engraving looking better, the new settings engrave the same exact files LOTS faster.

Obviously all machines are different, but since I put the new BJJCZ card in the Triumph, it also likes the new settings. These settings did the Star Wars thing...

For fun, run a 1 minute-ish job at both these settings and check out how much slower the old are compared to the new!

[Kev Williams]

So, I took the unicorn pic above, saved it to my computer, adjusted the contrast a bit, sent it to my old win98 so my old Casmate could vectorize it- took about 12 seconds, imported it back to Corel, saved it as a DXF, then fiber'd it using my ebay 2 laser with the loonngg 420mm lens, I didn't hatch fill it, only ran the outlines--
unicorn.jpg
The 420 lens has a much fatter beam spot so it's not quite as crisp looking as the Star Wars, but then this is only 2" tall and 1.6" wide, about 60% of the size, so not bad!

-the Corel file is below, but if you try to combine it to paint it, you'll likely get an 'its too big' error
--I did absolutely no editing, just scanned and ran--

I shot a video of the whole process from start to finish, even with all my screw-ups, the vid is only 6:42 long. I work fast -- it's uploading ...
(by the way, forgive the mess, it's the maid's day off )

and I want to clarify-- in the video I refer to the casmate I'm using as a DOS program, but I keep forgetting I'm using my Win95 windows version instead of my DOS version.

[Kim McIntosh]

Anyone else getting a private video message on Kev's video?

[Kev Williams]

Sorry, I don't do Youtube much, keep forgetting to NOT go private

[Robert Mangas]

Super cool, thanks for sharing! Amazing etch speed.

[Nick Marchesani]

That was so much faster engraving and so much better than what I am getting. I'm going to have to keep trying settings. I should try a different material instead of the back of an acrylic mirror. I'm thinking my problem is removing whatever coating is on the back of the acrylic mirror.

[Kev Williams]

could be the problem-- find something metal such as stainless or aluminum.