Hello,
We are searching for a job shop who can laser cut small parts on a continual basis. Parts are 1.25" x 1.75" and smaller. Parts will be cut from sterling silver at .025", and brass at .032".
Believe it or not, I have been searching for a vendor to cut these parts for over a year now. At this point it seems clear that a "normal" Co2 laser cannot do this, that we are in need of a high powered pulse yag or fiber laser. I have contacted every manufacturer that I could find who sells these lasers for a list of job shops, and done exhaustive searches for job shops separately as well. So far we have found only 2 job shops in the entire United States who can cleanly penetrate the material. I am talking with a couple more who think they can but have yet to prove it. I have a massive list of companies who cannot. The reason that I am writing is that the companies that we have found, their quotes are not cheap (many many times the cost of cutting other easy materials like steel). They are used to dealing with aerospace and other high end industries. At this point we cannot afford these services, our overhead would be too high to offer our product.
Acid etch has also proven to be a possibility, but it is not ideal, as the minimum orders are much higher and material recovery is less possible. Waterjet has proven to not be fine enough, even the omax mini jets, the smallest on the market that we could find, had too thick of a kerf for our parts.
Please- if you can help or know of someone who can, let me know. If our company takes off we will be looking to buy our own machine, but in the interim this is out only option.
Thank you so much for your help.