[pyroplotter]

Thank you for your sharing of information about your design. The videos are particularly informative. I have a CNC table that is a subset of a Torchmate kit sold by Applied Robotics. I first built this table in 2005 for use in wood sign engraving onto full sheets of plywood when we were living on our horse ranch. This year we sold the ranch and are now living in a house in a town and I have a garage. So the table was reduced from 1100 pounds, 5' x 8' x 14' down to a 5' x 6' gantry / platform instead.

I'm now working with 36" x 48" wood pieces so far and using hot points like irons and nichrome wire to burn into the wood. The results are accurate but not stellar and I need not worry about ever becoming a threat to anyone's livelihood. But the gantry system can use different heads for drills, routers, engravers, and my own version of a pyrographic burner and I'm still experimenting with what I can do with the tool.

And at this point your own work becomes a guide.

I like your use of the J48-1 laser which is what I'd like to duplicate here. Cutting a gear from denim relates to something that I'd like to try here in arts and crafts activities. I have Engravelab Photo Laser software which lets me create inlays and such and using a laser to cut fabrics leads to some possibilities for the Xmas season.

So my questions are ... do you use the UC1000 controller ? And do you use it in pulsed mode for your power control ? What settings burned the wood without the lens ? And did you have to jump through any hoops regarding safety when buying the device ? ( ie ... and certifications / licenses / authorizations that I need to get to buy and use such a device ? )

Thanks in advance for any answers and best regards.

Wil

[KTP]

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My plotter just got a laser upgrade! I bought a known broken Synrad 48-5-28W 50 watt laser and spent all day today repairing several fried circuits and damaged components on one of the two control boards. Someone had evidently miswired the unit as one trace leading to the DB9 connector was vaporized!

Reinstalled the circuit, powered up the included! UC-1000 controller and switching power supply and presto 64 watts of power with a really great beam profile! I am so happy now...my engraver project was in need of a bigger laser and this should fit the bill.

I took a picture of it blasting through a piece of balsa into a brick (which took about 0.01 seconds for the unfocused beam ) but the laser melted the brick and turned it incandescent so all you really see is what looks like the worlds most impressive white light laser (chair) I took another picture with the laser off so you could actually see things. Yes, I know this laser needs water cooling. It came with the hoses and connections, but it is perfectly fine to run it for a few seconds for the testing and pictures. There is actually quite a bit of aluminum that has to get warm before the laser would start complaining.

[KTP]

Wtawtaw:

Up until today, I didn't have a UC-1000 controller, but now I do. I probably will not use it since I will have several embedded microcontrollers in the final engraver machine and will generate the tickle pulse with them. It is very nice to have if you are not familiar with digital electronics.

If speed is not an issue, you can totally get by with a little J48-1 Synrad. Air cooled and so very easy to use. They put out quite a bit more than the stated 10 watts too. You could cut fabric, paper, rubber, acrylic, wood, foam, and lots of other stuff. I even carved a foam halloween pumpkin with one! Stepping up to the bigger power mostly allows an increase in speed, but also thickness to some extent.

You need to use a lens to do any usefull work. A lens will provide you with a small spot for fine detail but more important will drastically increase the power density (which is why you are using a laser instead of a flashlight no?) allowing the material to be vaporized without heating the surrounding material (little char and burning). Lenses happen to be all over ebay now...just search for ZnSe.

Hmm, the only license I can think of that you need to buy a CO2 laser might be a driver's license if you happen to be in a small town in Alaska where UPS doesn't deliver. Seriously, there are few regulations about industrial lasers...though if kids keep shining pointers at planes and helicopters, there will be soon.

[Laser Guy]

KTP
I saw your other post but had no idea you were building a beam delivery
system.I have a 2.0" focal length lens with your name on it. Some chips on the edges but it will definitely work to get to off ground. I'll send it in a mount used with Epilog laser engravers,You pay for the shipping and it's yours.

[KTP]

Thanks very much for the kind offer Laserguy, but I have this addiction to collecting lenses so I am probably covered in that aspect (see picture below). The main problems I am having are decided if I want to go to the trouble of making a galilean beam expander (I have enough optics for it) or just bounce the raw beam from the output of the Synrad around my mirrors. The beam expander might give me a smaller spot size...

Edit: I had not read your other post. Is the lens you have meniscus?

[Laser Guy]

I use Plano Convex

[KTP]

Most excellent! A 0.004" spot size from a plano-convex lens with no beam expander optics...EXACTLY what type of performance I hope to achieve.

Thanks for the information!

[pyroplotter]

KTP ... well as promised I got a J48-1 now and bought the new UC2000 controller for a good price for a refurbished laser directly from Synrad. Then I got a good lab supply off ebay and some high velocity fans also. I am not going to be water cooling this one just yet.

Got the optics from Laser Mechs but have a question for you ... what's your experience in gas nozzle pressure flow rates and use of different gases ? For my limited application of laser engraving onto wood, rather than cutting of wood, and with all the gases that produces, would I be better off going to a bottle of Nitrogen right away rather than breathing air ?

[KTP]

Hey wtawtaw, congrats on your new laser!

Air cooling a J48-1 is perfectly fine, the heat load is only like 200 watts or something.

So do you actually have a gas nozzle or just the lens?

Don't use bottled nitrogen, that would get expensive in a hurry. I use clean dry shop air, at varying pressures up to 60PSI or so. I made a dryer comprised of (don't laugh) a long piece of 3 inch dia galvanized plumbing pipe with a hose barb tapped into each end and filled with 3 bags of descicant contained inside panty hose. It is like a $10 descicant dryer with a huge volume! Every now and then you can drive the water out of the descicant with heat, or you can just replace it (like $1 from home depot). Before this dryer I have the common water/air separator, but that doesn't remove all the water. After this dryer I use a small screen inline filter to remove any descicant dust that makes it through the panty hose, but to date there does not seem to be much dust.

So are you mounting the laser directly to the gantry? If so, I imagine you will be up and running in like a couple days...show us pictures!

[pyroplotter]

Hello KTP .... I really like your CDA dessicator design and you bet! I'll do the same thing here. I found a small compressor that only draws 2 amps and that will supply the table.

The last couple of days have been intense and I've made progress in the laser mount. The gantry moves in X only, and the laser is mounted on a stilt type of platform over top the Z axis assembly. The optics will move in Z a maximum of 3 inches in relation to the laser and I am making my own tube-in-tube slider.

I've chose this method because I have a very sensitive Z axis crash detect system and am using that for the laser optics also. The design allows me also to easily remove the optics ( a simple bolt-on bracket ) and use either an electric engraver, a pneumatic engraver, a dremel drill / engraver, or a hot point soldering iron.

I'm not totally happy yet with how all the lines run but I've attached some pix of what I've been able to complete. We'll be ging to Hawaii next week and I will not likely get the laser fired up before then. And I'll have something to look forward to when the palm trees and mai-tai's get boring .

So here's a couple of pix of the table as it now exists.

[KTP]

Very nice setup wtawtaw!

[killor]

:wee: :wee: :wee: :wee: :wee: :wee: :wee: :wee:
:banana: :banana: :banana: :banana: :banana: :banana: :banana: :banana:

My plotter just got a laser upgrade! I bought a known broken Synrad 48-5-28W 50 watt laser and spent all day today repairing several fried circuits and damaged components on one of the two control boards. Someone had evidently miswired the unit as one trace leading to the DB9 connector was vaporized!

Reinstalled the circuit, powered up the included! UC-1000 controller and switching power supply and presto 64 watts of power with a really great beam profile! I am so happy now...my engraver project was in need of a bigger laser and this should fit the bill.

I took a picture of it blasting through a piece of balsa into a brick (which took about 0.01 seconds for the unfocused beam ) but the laser melted the brick and turned it incandescent so all you really see is what looks like the worlds most impressive white light laser (chair) I took another picture with the laser off so you could actually see things. Yes, I know this laser needs water cooling. It came with the hoses and connections, but it is perfectly fine to run it for a few seconds for the testing and pictures. There is actually quite a bit of aluminum that has to get warm before the laser would start complaining.

Hello,
I read that you had to repair the laser unit.
Would a picture from inside your laser unit?
I am interested in knowing, The Duo-Lase technique.
What optics used for the two beams combined?

Thanks