Stray marks with Pinnacle M-25 & Corel 12

[Travis Shipman]

Hello all,

I just started having problems today while engraving on laserlights plastic. Whatever engraving I do turns out great until I take a closer look at it. There are a lot of what appear to be light scratches and scuff marks around what I engrave, no matter what it is. I've checked and double-checked the material before engraving and there was nothing wrong with it. After several times engraving the same thing I noticed that the scratches were all in the same place, same pattern. I created a new 1-layer design in Corel 12 and sent it to the laser again but still came out with the same problem. I just tried engraving the same text onto a different piece of plastic with the same rsults. Anybody ever had this problem before? I have a lot of orders piling up that are due Monday so if anybody can help it would be greatly appreciated.

[Joe Pelonio]

I'm not familiar with the Pinnacle but let me take a stab at a couple of things to try. Print the file on paper and see if there are marks on it too.
If so, look at your Corel file in wireframe mode and see if there are some lines under the rest that you didn't know about. If they do not print, do you have a auto-focus or air assist unit that maybe is messed up and dragging onto the work? On my Epilog you can run it with the door open and the beam won't fire, if you can do that watch and see if anything's hitting the material.

Last thing to try is cleaning lenses and mirrors, could be stray beams bouncing around.

Good luck, may not be too many people online today.

[Jackie McGowan]

Hi, I have an M-25 Pinnacle and had what sounds like the same problem...
This is what sign warehouse told me to try, I did it and it worked. You may want to try it (you have to see picture attachedof mother board)........

This is caused by over agitation. If the laser gets moved on a regular basis or has been moved recently, the CO2 inside the laser can get to active.
Another cause of this is un normally cold weather. This machine likes to stay with in 60-80 degree weather. If it gets colder than that over agitation can occur if not given enough time to properly warm up.

The way to get it settled down is to change a jumper on the main board.
First we must disconnect the power cord from the machine.
If you look on the right side of the machine there is a panel with 6 screws in it.
This covers the main board. Remove the 6 screws and remove the panel.
You will then see the main board, move the jumper from 5K to 3K. (Refer to the picture I sent you for location of jumper)
You will then need put the panel back on.
Connect some power to the laser.
Turn the machine on.
Drop the table all the way down after initialization
In your software draw a black square or circle. Give it a black fill so it will raster engrave and not vector cut. Make sure it covers almost the entire width and height of the table.
Send the file to the laser at 100% speed and 100% power.
Run the job.
With the table all the way down nothing will be engraved. So just let it run until complete.
Once finished you can do some test with regular engraving to see if you still get the extra lines.
If you don't you are ready to rock and roll.
If you do, you will need to rerun the square/circle job again, then test it.
I have seen some customer who have had to run the job 3 or 4 to get the laser tube calmed down again.
Just do a test after you run the file.

[Rodne Gold]

If the engraving is "ghosting" ie the marks follow the outline of the engraving (to the left and right), then its the trickle voltage thing (so called overexcitation).
Easy way to check if its that is to rotate the graphic 90 degrees and engrave it , if the stray marks rotate 90 degrees its not a machine problem but a driver or file problem.

[Kevin Huffman]

Hello Travis,
What version of driver are you using? Go to File/Print/Properties, on the Paper tab in the bottom left hand corner it tells you what version you are using.

[Travis Shipman]

Thank you all for your help and I apologize for not responding. I've been gone for quite some time and could not respond to your posts. I had to use a different material since no matter what I tried the marks would not go away. It only happens with the Laserlights material. Maybe it is overexcitation because after trying to engrave the Laselights, I have to shut the machine off for a while or the stray marks will show up on new materials I try to use. Kevin, I am using version 3.42. Is there a newer one available? Thanks again to Joe, Jackie, Rodne and Kevin for the posts and sorry for the slow response.