How To Laser Cut and Engrave Leather & Hide

[Music] welcome to another much play dirty map um it's not quite cold enough my breath to show at the moment but it's quite cold in here it's my little coat on today but hey we should soldier on for the purpose of science because today I'm going to be doing something I haven't really played with before a long time ago I messed around with a little piece of there though one of these machines on my old machine and my only memories of that occasion were that it was very smelly and very difficult to keep the surface clean so today we're going to look into some letters because basically there are two types of leather around we've got this sort here which is the sort you find on the sole of your shoe which is basically something called natural tanned hide that's a process that's been going on for thousands of years now a slightly more modern process which is used for these very thin leathers where they look to chamois on the back but you've got the skin texture on the front these are sort of things that you'd use for furnishings and car seats and things like that these are tanned by a process called chromate tanning but they haven't got a leathery smell to be honest they don't smell of anything whereas this hide naturally tanned hide smells exactly like you'd expect real leather to smell so we've got two problems first of all this stuff is very floppy and flexible what we're going to do it apart from cutout car seats and sofas and leather cushions other things if you're that way inclined I think we'll start off with this stuff and we'll see how it cuts now to play with this we've got some standard equipment here and some non-standard equipment when I say non-standard equipment I mean non-standard that's supplied with the machine your machine would definitely have been supplied with a 2-inch lens now generally it's applied with a church gallium arsenide lens because for cutting wood this is probably the best lens that I've found and then we've got a nozzle here with a very small hole in the end two and a half millimeter hole that is basically what I call a cutting nozzle because it focuses the air down to get it right into the cut itself and only sits maybe five or six millimeters away from the cutting surface now that's fine for cutting where you want lots of air into your cut but when it comes to engraving the last thing you want is to blow lots of air at your engraved surface and so consequently I have designed something that I call a universal engraving nozzle it's got a much larger hole in it it's much shorter and it takes eighteen millimeter diameter lenses which are non-standard lenses for this machine because what it does you can put a lens in the bottom there and it sits the nozzle a long way off the surface so that you don't put much air assists down onto the surface and you allow your a little exploding surface to go up in the air and stay in the air rather than get blown down and mark the surface of your work so we've got this which we shall be using later on and experimenting with this is acid' it's not a piece of standard kit that comes with the machine there is a chinese website they're called cloud Raycom where you'll be able to buy this Universal engraving nozzle so this is the same Universal nozzle but in this particular assembly I've got two lenses stacked together and this is what I call a compound lens and it is specifically for making very very small dots somewhere in the region of 0.1 or less so that we can do very fine quality picture engraving with this particular nozzle it also works as a cutting nozzle as well surprisingly enough so this is a moderately Universal this is specifically for if you want to for instance use a two inch lens or a two and a half inch lens for engraving and the sort of application you might have for that would be 3d engraving but these are - this particular nozzle is really a cutting nozzle so what happens if I want to do a job with cutting and engraving on it now you have a choice and you have to make some good engineering decisions if you've got lots of cutting and not much engraving I'd go for this nozzle if you've got lots of engraving and just a little bit of cutting around the outside I'd compromise and go for that nozzle but the requirements of engraving and the requirements of cutting are almost diametrically opposite and so you have to make some compromises somewhere well as we said we can start life trying to cut this material so I think I do will select a cutting nozzle and we'll see how good this gallium arsenide is that cutting leather it was excellent a cutting wood so I know that to cut this I'm going to produce a large amount of smoke that goes underneath if I had the honeycomb table on the air would come through the front of the machine down through the table and out the back and it wouldn't really be taking this smoke away the smoke would be sitting here hanging around inside the cabinet so what I want you to do today is to also while we're cutting I want you to watch what happens to the smoke because we've got this table here and the air flow passing through the front we've got our cross flow are there as I'm so keen to keep telling you and that will go out the back of the machine at high rate of knots in a very control Manor it won't get a chance to escape inside the machine here so when you open the lid you won't fill the room with horrible smelly smoke now the last thing we really want to do is to cut this on a flat surface the only reason I put it there in the flat surfaces so you can see that paint we've got a bit of a problem look alright so we want to try and keep this flat always a difficult problem when you get things like that or prisoners of plywood which are bent so the way that I normally try and tackle this problem is where possible I can support my material off the bed with a magnet here and there and because these are neodymium magnets they are very very strong and I can just do this so we've got an only going to work on one door 25 millimeter test square at a time so I don't need to support it too much just in a few places here and there so this is a two-inch lens and typically this would be around about seven millimeters I believe it's distance right so we're just going to now see if we can find the correct focal distance with my little dot test that I use [Music] I've recently purchased a new device off of ebay for absolutely half of nothing I think it is probably back to band or to pound 50 so Otto illuminates when you open it [Music] now it's a little section of almost like burnt leather right round the outside of every hole or line which is the thing that's causing the main color a shin here the center of the dot or the center of the mark is actually quite pleased and I would say that that is a pretty good focus because it's not it's a good clean set of lines and dots the dots a point to diameter they're touching each other but that's about as good as I can expect from a 2 inch lens we're now going to do a 25 millimeter test square now what sort of speed and power should I run out well if I was doing this out of three or four millimeter plywood and it looks to be closer to 4 millimeters I would think I would probably be running it at about 20 millimeters a second with full power I think we might start this off at 15 millimetres a second and see what happens we're either going too fast or too slow there is no right place to start now foes the door so that we can get proper air flow across the job and you can see what I mean about the smoke being generated and how it rips out the back of the machine now there's smoke coming out of the top which is worrying but something you can see those we've got all this horrible smoke trail coming out the corners here where when it turned the corner it started blowing smoke at the back of the emotion and we've also got some coloration on here as well so as I said this is very similar to the memories that I had of it before it's a difficult material to cut and the other thing I need to test which is what I do for plywood yeah it's not exactly it's not exactly clean on the edges is it so we've reduced the speed down to 13 millimeters a second from 15 and we've reduced the power down so that the minimum is now 11% and the maximum is 85% so hopefully it will slow down as it gets to these corners and produce slightly less so we've still got smoke coming up on top of the job and lots of it underneath as well it's still got lots of muck on the edge normally we only get this debris on the start corner we've got all four corners here so this is a very unsatisfactory way I can't see a way of getting rid of that smoke normally on wood it's pretty easy to get rid of on lever it looks as though it's going to be a bit of a problem there is a fairly simple solution provided you're only cutting we'll turn the job over [Music] so there we are we can still see the burn marks on the corners although they're not quite as bad because this material doesn't hold on to the smoke as easily as this lovely shiny surface on this side so now you see we've got almost a smoke free cut as opposed to the first two at the bottom there as you can see here we're producing a lot of smoke that's going downwards and condensing you know this is horrible really horrible sticky stuff this is worse than wood just take this off while it's nice and fresh and sticky it comes off nice and easily so nothing has changed from my first experience of leather it's difficult to keep clean when you're cutting it now the last time I had this problem the solution was very simple masking tape or there's something called paper transfer tape which is used in the transfer of vinyl transfers onto things like vans or shop windows don't get the plastic one get the paper version and that does just the same job and you can gather in wide reels fumes [Music] back down to where it was previously when the pieces fell oh so we've got 13 millimeters a second 11 percent power for the coroners minimum and 85 percent power for the rest of the cat [Music] we could just check this piece out and that's fairly clean on the back as we would expect it to be provided it doesn't drop and then of course on the front here we can just peel off the tape and as expected it's perfectly clean so that's a solution and that's the only solution that I came across before to crafting this sort of leather mask it all now if we're having this much trouble with leather cutting it what on earth is it going to do when we try and engrave it [Music] well that 115 [Music] as you can see it looks pretty messy so let's take the speed up to 420 so it's hardly cutting through the tape at the moment I'm running so far so this is really a bit of a painful exercise you can clean all these little bits of tape out from the letters and if you've got things like ours and B and you're gonna finish up possibly with sticky stuff I ask myself is there a better way of achieving this but I had to show you that to show you the problem that you have with engraving texts you still get all this brown stuff and in fact it's even worse because there is nowhere for this stuff to go other than upwards or sideways what happens is as the laser hits the surface it produces like a little volcanic reaction it's a bit like dropping if you'd like a stone into a soft pile of sand some of it will go up a lot of it will go sideways and that's what you're seeing here you're seeing that same eruptive effect but now I've made several significant changes first of all we've put the engraving the universal engraving nozzle on here which is not something you're normally provided with it's got a very very small air pipe coming into here as you can see we've put the full millimeter air pipe inside the six millimeter air pipe if I put my finger on the end here you probably can hear [Music] the build-up of flow the pressure builds up behind my finger and you get a little but if I do it quickly there's nothing there at all there's virtually nowhere just enough to protect the lens okay now in addition to that you'll see that now instead of a fan a six millimeter air gap that we've got here we've got probably something like about nineteen or twenty millimeters yeah it's about nineteen millimeter air gap under there now that's going to allow this volcanic eruption that happens to come up in the air even though this airflow here is very small when it goes through that very small nozzle there it still produces quite a significant stream of air which is blowing the fumes back down onto the work first of all we stop the air from blowing them back down by making it very very low velocity by reducing the power as much as we can so that we get much more of a an upward drift rather than an explosive sideways force the deeper we go the more explosive and sideways we're going to get our smoke and the final thing that I'm going to do as I'm going to change the start position you see it starting at the top and running down this time I'm going to start at the bottom and run towards the finish point this is exactly the same lens exactly the same speed ie four hundred millimeters a second but the power Allura dropped the power to around about let's try 20% I still got the scanning interval set at point one which is the same as I was using [Music] it's not so dark but the other thing is if we look the debris in here is still capable of smudging onto the work [Music] look how much debris there is in there that's not a very satisfactory way of Engraving either what other choice have we got okay I'm now gonna make another change I'm gonna remove this engraving nozzle these Universal engraving nozzle which has got a two inch lens in it and I'm going to replace it with another Universal engraving nozzle but this time it's got a compound lens in which produces a very very small dot so I'm now in our D works and I have imported a piece of text this time as a bitmap because it's a bitmap I've come in at about 150 pixels per inch quite a low resolution and we've got the line spacing set to about 0.15 I've got the power set to about 20% and the speed is still at 400 okay look we can see smoke not huge amount of it I'm not even running the extract system this time and that looks pretty good doesn't it make sure we get a good imprint a look we've got virtually zero debris and it's pretty flat there's not much in the way of depression there and look I can rub it as much as I like and I can't smear it we found a solution import a bitmap and run it lowish resolution 150 dots per inch we've got one more thing that we can do taken that piece of text which is a bitmap and I've actually divid it I have changed the picture resolution up to 254 pixels per inch which is a pixel size of 0.1 which is what I'm confident that this lens can do produce point 1 dots so we've got dots at 254 pixels per inch and a scanline interval of 0.1 I dropped the power even further to 15% and I'm still keeping the speed at 400 watt smoke I can see hardly anything at all and of course no smoke means I'm not going to produce any damage to my work there is a very small amount of smoke drifting around which if I had the fan on would have sucked away instantly and you wouldn't have seen anything at all now somewhere on there was our first test [Music] and some were on there is our second test now there's virtually no difference between those at all this is virtually smooth this is not bad either so either of those are really nice clean pieces of engraving so the technique is to use a bitmap and not a vector file for your engraving on leather will run the same file with a two inch lens so that we can compare the difference no change in parameters we're still running with a point one this lens is capable of doing point two dots not point one dots so we should actually get probably a bit of a burn effect on this one and maybe produce more smoke than we need to sure enough we are producing more smoke [Music] but that's not bad at all is it let's just see what debris we can pull off nothing there at all really we could try that same thing at 127 dots per each which is the correct resolution for that lens well again we can see the dots this time just that's not a problem at all so I would say a 2-inch lens with a 256 dot per inch gives a good result crisp clear dark without any depth to it really there's just the merest hint of depth to it well I suppose we've got one more test to do to take us around in a full circle and that is we put the we put the cutting nozzle back on with the two inch lens and we're going to dinner at 256 dots per each and we're going to run at 15% power and 400 millimetres a second okay so that was a bit of a mistake because I had air assist on well from a distance it doesn't look too bad when you get a bit closer there is some browning on there some smoke damage [Music] and there we go you can see the smoke damage on there now so I'm afraid that the standard nozzle is definitely not as good as the universal engraving nozzle the universal engraving nozzle seems to do a good job whatever we do with it but the standard nozzle mm it does a reasonable job but it isn't anywhere near it's probably 90% as good as these even though we've got a very very small amount of air passing through that nozzle because it is focused down into a jet it still disrupts the little eruptions that are taking place on the surface there is spreading them out and condensing them around the product okay so we found out that we can produce smokeless engraving on the surface of this hide now to do that what we've found was that we can do it with the smallest possible dots and the minimum amount of damage to the surface we just produce a little teeny-weeny spike of smoke that blows away quickly we can still damage the surface and put a nice mark on there but we're not going to do a huge amount of damage to the surface and that's the secret if you want to engrave pictures on your leather be they photographs or images of some sort something more than text then obviously we can't use tape or anything on the surface because you just won't be able to get it off so we've got to be able to do it in a smokeless manner and to do that we must use the compound engraving lens because we found that if we use the 2 inch lens yeah we've got some success even though we're not using much air when we peel off and test the surface we've still got debris sitting on the surface now when we're using the compound engraving lens we're going to be putting down a series of dots both in the backwards and forwards direction now for our dots to make any sense at all they've basically got to line up with each other now if I going to Rd works to the configure system settings what I should find here is I've got something called scanning reverse compensation when it comes to dot engraving there are certain speeds that you really need to use hundred 150 maybe 200 tops but on average if you run at 150 millimeters a second you'll get pretty good results with the compound engraving lens but to get those results you've got to make sure that your scanning is uniform in both directions now what I'm going to do here is I'm going to turn off the scanning offset compensation which is built into the machine now I've dealt with this in a separate program but we'll just go through it very quickly again to show you the problem now to see this effect all you need to do is to draw a very simple rectangle or a square it doesn't matter we'll make it 15 millimeters wide and about 20 millimeters tall and we've got to set it to scan as opposed to cut and we're going to set the speed initially to 400 now I'm going to set it to 400 because that shows you and exaggerate the problem even though we're not going to use 400 at the moment I'm going to show you and power 20% should be good enough now we're going to set the interval to not 0.5 millimeters 0.5 enter we're going to have x-wing and we're gonna have no ticks up here at all okay now here's our problem as you can see when we scan in one direction the beam takes a few microseconds to start off the beam finishes in the right place but then when it steps down to the next line there's a little bit of a delay in its starting so you can see there's a scanning difference between these two directions and what that means is if I've got a series of dots that I want to line up with very accurately to produce a nice picture I'm not going to get it unless I make all these lines start and finish at the same point my dots are going to be out of sync and I'm gonna get a bit of a fuzzy picture I'm never going to get a crisp clean detailed picture so to fix this problem we need to use the scanning offset okay now I'm going to do another test and I'm going to put the scanning offset on for for mint 400 millimeters a second now a few sessions ago I did cover the whole of this subject in detail and you'll see that I've got the compensation in here of not 0.1 millimeters for 400 millimeters a second so let's leave it at that close this is the same test with the compensation in and now I hope you can see the difference down here we've got virtually all of the lines lined up okay and so what we've done we've fixed this offset with a little bit of special compensation they're never going to be absolutely perfect down here for high speeds but as you reduce the speed of scanning this effect here becomes less and you can get this a lot more accurate so again another reason for using a fairly low speed so that we get very accurate positioning of our dots in both the left and right directions now that might have looked quite fast to you but in reality that's 150 millimeters a second and you can see the difference because we've slowed the speed down we've got darker lines and so here's our scanning offset at 150 millimeters a second now the scanning offset on this machine has been set to point zero five but your machine will undoubtedly be different so you cannot use my numbers you have to find your numbers out by using this very simple ladder test so we're now ready to try some detailed engraving with this machine okay now as we saw earlier there's no such thing as a piece of flat leather so we have to be rather inventive about how we try and hold this flat I put the magnets in the middle here as well so that I've got a level surface so I'm gonna force this into a slight curve like this so that when I place it on top of these the middle is sitting level and then I'm going to put the magnets on top and hopefully the magnets will pull where I want to engrave which is in this area here it will be flat now I can't guarantee that it's going to be level around the edges as you can see I could put some more support magnets around the edge and I think they've got a reasonably flat surface in there for doing our work on so obviously you're not going to be able to do this on your handbag or your shoes but this is a demonstration you've got to be inventive about how you how you use this particular procedure we're going to be using the same speed 150 that we selected for our offset compensation because if we use 149 or 151 millimeters a second the compensation will not be taken into account the only speed of where this compensation will take place is the ones that you put in your table it's a lookup table it's not a graphical interpretation well here's the image that we're going to try and put onto the leather if I look at the size of this it's actually about 150 millimeters square roughly so I need to change this to 90 millimeters square ish so that it fits on our material I can now go and look in the bitmap handle and what would you find is that we've got a resolution of 250 pixels per inch which is great because that's nearly what we want we've got a point we want to use 254 so I'm going to set the output to 254 because that happens to be a point 1 pixel size but before we did it with a dot graphic what I'm going to do is look at that picture and say hmmm I think probably I could do with enhancing it a little bit as far as contrast is concerned so I'm gonna play with the contrast a little bit and we just apply it to see what happens we've just brightened the picture up a little bit and improve the contrast in these areas just up here this is where a certain amount of skill and practice comes in so I'm going to now select dot graphic and we're going to convert that into a binary dot picture and is that just a series of dots we're gonna apply that to the main view which is here and again there it is we're going to set the speed to 150 we're not going to have any air blowing down on the job except that's that that which is protecting the lens we've got to set the power and the focus for this machine we know that we want to run at 150 millimeters a second we're going to have X swing and we can have nothing in these tick boxes up here the only thing we're left to play with now is this power so it's a-ok for the moment and then we'll go and set the focus up now although we normally are used to seeing this focus gauge here which is half millimeter steps when I'm using this compound Linn sort of much finer resolution measuring gauge that runs from ten millimeters to 12 millimeters and nominally the focus for this lens is somewhere around about ten point five to eleven ten point seven maybe now I'm going to use my little focus-test patent that tells me two things it tells me the focus and whether I've not I've got my dots at point one diameter well it's definitely nice and dark question is what do the dots look like yeah it's nice and dark but I can't see any single dots the dots are merged together they're roughly point to those dots at the moment yep we're going with 11 millimeters now I have noticed that as you changed the material you sometimes need to change the focal point by maybe as much as half a millimeter so sometimes it works at ten point five sometimes it works at anything up to eleven or eleven point two in this instance we've got 11 millimeter so now we've got to go back to our picture and match the picture parameters to the same as those that we used for our test which is 15% power and 150 millimeters a second now I'm going to close the lid so that we get area flow across the job [Music] now something I've said many times before is if you've got a very powerful 200 100 watts 150 watts there's not a great deal of chance that you'll be able to do things as delicate as this you need a low-power tube in the 40 to 60 maybe you might get away with 80 watts running at low power to get this sort of fine resolution photo engraving or picture engraving now you probably look at that and say that's pretty good - my critical eye it's far too dark I've got too much power in there I think I'll reduce the power from 15 percent and I'll drop it right down for about probably 12 percent now you can see the difference between the two this one you can see the detail here and it's totally over burnt there so you've got to get the balance of power right as well there's no three deenis in this at all there is no burning or browning on the surface and there we go when I do my sticky paper test on both of those that will show you how much debris is coming out of this second picture virtually none the first one was well and truly overburn okay let's just have a quick look around that picture [Music] some of the detail [Music] now right up close you can see that it's made up of dots or are they the holes in the hide where the hairs went nobody will ever know except you and I because as soon as you start zooming out the standing this at arm's length it looks pretty phenomenal that's what you can do with hide and a compound lens which is taken of getting your 0.1 dot you can convert your 254 PPI pictures need to 254 DPI pictures as you can see there since I lasted this video you'll notice that I've got a rather strange voice I've developed a very heavy cold but that doesn't stop me working I'm a bloke and I just carry on now what we've got here is something completely different than the thick hide here we've got the chromate tanned leather which is a soft leather the sort of things I might use to make some new seats for my Ferrari for example or if I was that way inclined maybe my new handbag now this is a completely different problem because first of all it's floppy and much as I hate using the bars or the honeycomb table I'm afraid that's the only way that we're going to be able to do with this particular material we are going to finish up with a few marks on the back and there are ways that I could design things too like a little a version of this for example which sits on top of my solid table which would be a series of acrylic bars and acrylic when it cuts would not mark the back of the product but I'm not going to go to the trouble of that at the moment but if you were actually doing this sort of work then you might want to think about making a special jig to hold the material so that it doesn't mark on the back so I would think about using the two inch standard lens the shortest focal length lens that you've been supplied with your machine now the nozzle is obviously a standard nozzle that you've got which has got a two and a half millimeter hole in the end now that's quite a large hole I'll demonstrate what we'll get with this two and a half millimeter hole now I'm going to set up a little test square in here which is 25 millimeters square we're going to test a few speeds and powers wrong we're going to test speeds because I always start off with maximum power when of cutting organic materials don't fiddle around with lower powers just go straight for the throat and go with the maximum power that your machine will output at the safe current so we go for maximum setting on this machine which I believe is 78 percent which should give me 22 milliamps and speed well that's the only thing that we're going to play with and we need to try and find them very very fastest speed that we can anything slow will cause charring on the edges the faster we go the better the edge condition will be so I'm going to start off at about say 25mm there's a second nine eight seven there we go seven millimeters pretty messy on the surface but we've got brain debris on the surface there and it doesn't rub off easily oh we got [Music] childish ideas they're not playing they're definitely black and the real test of what the age is like is if you get a piece of white tissue [Music] and there we go there's definitely some charring on the edge let's go silly i'ma go certified that works and I think immediately you could say on the edge that we've got a lot less Charles still got some debris on there 55 millimeters a second we can still see that we've got some debris around the edge here there's less of it and I suspect that this is just about hanging in there look the interest is becoming quite Brown we shall never be able to get away with that I don't think with leather let's push on 65 millimeters a second now I saw a lot of smoke coming up on the top here and that tends to indicate to me that we haven't cut through properly so I think we've probably reached our limit Wow yeah we've still got some black marks on there but they're nowhere near as heavy as they were to start with okay so the next issue now is to try and solve the debris on the top surface here I've got a piece of duct tape I'm gonna stick that over the end of the nozzle as I said it's not going to look pretty but what I got to do now is to give it a few pulses we had last time yeah we're still got debris on the edge and we still got marking on the surface now the marking on the surface is all to do with the heiress's what we're trying to do is to get as much air as we can through the cut and not have any air come out on top of the job any smoke that comes upwards will get blown back down and that's what you're seeing here you're getting smoke this black blown back down onto the job we're trying to get as close to the job as we possibly can with the nozzle and so for my next trick what I'm going to do is I'm going to put an o-ring [Music] over the thread of the nozzle and that's going to push the nozzle down closer to the work by about half okay so now you're blowing an intense jet of air much concept of the work for millimeter gap now right on the edge of cutting your game at 65 millimeters it's a second but we still haven't got rid of this burn on the outside here which is puzzling right we're now going to try a completely different approach I've removed this nozzle assembly I'm going to replace this with a tube that has no lens in it at all but what I've got here is a special nozzle and lens assembly that I have designed it's called a compound lens there are two lenses in there that produce a very very sharp focus and I'm going to use this to see whether or not we can solve this problem of marking on the surface now this doesn't come with a normal fitting it comes with a piece of tube that pushes into the nozzle there and we need to connect the nozzle up to the existing six millimeter tube the two tubes fit together you can hear that we've still got some air in there but it's so low it's not causing any down flow of air to blow debris back down onto the job so we're going to take the completely officer approach now to what we would normally use for conventional cutting ie trying to blow the fumes out of the bottom of the job this lens has got a setting of about ten point five millimeters if you use it for engraving you've got to be very very careful to get the function to get the focus right but for cutting well ten point five will be good enough I going to do this without the extraction on to see just what smoke we've got and where it's going [Music] and here we can see the difference so you've got virtually no smoke marks on here at all now the edge condition [Music] maybe slightly lighter on this one but I would suggest that now because we've got a much sharper lens we may actually be able to get up to 75 millimeters a second or more should we be ridiculous and try 85 memory is a second [Music] yeah it's loose it's clean very clean in the age condition remember I said the faster you go the less the charring because some but there's very little on there that's a pretty brown edge and we're getting almost up to Engraving speeds now let's try 95 millimeters a second [Music] just about on the limit we've just got a few fibers that are not cut with our edge condition [Music] is getting cleaner [Music] and cleaner and cleaner so you have conventional cutting technology that gets us up about 65 min of eight is a second and then all of a sudden we could get a clean edge with the pusher sound up to 95 Melanie it's a second with the compound lens [Music] well here we've got a piece of white leather you know this is stupid isn't it trying to cut white leather this looks like nearly 2 millimeters thick I'm gonna back the speed off to 85 millimeters a second for comfort we're just check-in cases is a different thickness it will still got roughly ten and a half mil slightly thicker material and it's not quite ten and a half we need to just reset the focus not quite this is a thicker material so we should have to back the speed off a little bit this is a very fluffy wooly material on the back and that's why it's not cutting very well we've still got a clean top surface so let's find out where we need to go with this particular material we've just about cut that out at 45 millimeters a second but that is pretty thick material but that's 2 millimeters thick and very very very on the back now this loose stuff on here will smoke and smoke absorbs the energy and so this is going to be this last little bit is going to be very difficult for the laser to pierce through cleanly you know the B charring on the corners are something we can do with separately because that's all to do with the speed of the deceleration of the cut as it goes into the corner so to get this to cut cleanly I my wife to drop it to 35 millimeters we've still got a fairly clean cut but we've got a burning in the corners but we can fix that fairly easily with Mac's mid speed so we've got 78 Mac's and 10% min min as almost as low as the machine will go and there we go we've got more or less clean corners now so it does show you that the thickness of the leather and the surface texture on the back of the leather has a significant effect on the cutting performance okay now we're going to go for a slightly different approach again and this time I've got my one inch square drawn on here because I need to be able to change the parameters fairly easily and what I've done this time we've gone into dock mode if you start off with the midpoint one that's a good nominal starting point and then from there on probably the one to change more than any is dot length now I've got this currently set at forty millimeters a second which is on a par with the performance that we had previously with the fluffy white leather we'll go back and we'll try the fluffy white leather but we'll start off with the so-called easier stuff which remember we were able to get up to about 95 millimeters a second width but we'll try it in doc mode and I've got full power again we're just punching straight the way through with no air assist just lens protection but it has just about come out fluffy yeah it's reasonably clean but it's still it's got a little bit of a shadowing round here we've got some debris coming up but this time because the power is intermittent all the way around we've got no sustained power to burn off the film trail that comes out behind the cut so let's have a look at the edge well not a lot different to the standard cut [Music] but I've changed the cut length now the dot length from point one to point five quite a significant difference they dropped out cleanly and I would say that that is probably dirtier I think you can see that definitely these are they've got a sort of a slightly dusky hue around the edge whereas these do not have now this is using a two inch lens again and we couldn't get up to 60 millimeters a second before and we're still struggling here so da ting really doesn't seem to make a great deal of difference so here we've got the two millimeter thick white leather which is very furry and soft and difficult to cut so this is a point three dot time and a point five dot length so we're back to point one point one and thirty milliliters a second and it's come out now that I've gone slower we've still got some marking around the edge here and plenty of plenty of carbon on the edge when we look at this leather it looks almost like felt it's got a very very loose texture inside here which means it's holding lots and lots of air inside which is why it's so difficult to cut it's not a solid material [Music] it doesn't want to come off its definitely burnt on there to stop the surface marking one trick that I often use is this one so if I stay away from the bars and just cut between the bars [Music] [Laughter] we should get a nice clean finish on the front surface then there we go well there's not a lot more to say really leather is hide is relatively straightforward soft leather depends on the thickness depends on the fuzziness and softness of the material although this is the same feeling soft leather it's quite a dense leather but thin this one is a very fluffy open poured leather and has actually proved to be quite difficult to cut yeah the next question is can we engrave this material well my suspicion is not very well because first of all it's very difficult to keep it flat I've got it sitting on a flat metal surface here I'm gonna make a lot of smoke now so I put the extraction on well I'm suspecting we're gonna have a few problems with engraving on this material we might be able to get through the surface here because underneath we've got a soft dish although it's dyed red we might get a pink contrast underneath [Music] the running is very fast at 400 millimeters a second and it really isn't too bad first of all let's have a quick look at what sort of we've got a little bit of debris tucked in these letters here [Music] on balance that's not bad because we don't seem to have produced any burn marks around the outside of the text and it's quite a reasonable contrast white stuff well to be fair what I should have done is is to engrave that from the bottom to the top that we change this headstart position to the bottom right hand corner and repeat this as you can see that's not particularly pretty either it's a bit feels of it's sticky the color underneath is not bad I've just changed the Machine setting to a special mode which means it's now going to produce a high-frequency pulsing cut as opposed to a continuous cut and that might allow us to get a slightly cleaner cut because we're producing a series of dots as opposed to a continuous burn and Wow I said that's done a good job hasn't it but it hasn't really because look it's all smeared so we've got all our dirt and debris in the bottom here and as soon as you touch it look it marks over the surface we'll do that one more time you can see the smoke it's just little bits of smoke rising very very gently it's not getting a chance to blow back down onto the job and paint the edge of the leather with the debris as you can see it looks a pretty good piece of text lovely and clean around the edge I've got some soapy wet kitchen towel here and I'm just going to see whether or not Wow okay so that works well there we go just ordinary soap and a soap and wetness cleans up this very nicely it's only just surface debris these will clean up with soap and water as well so maybe leather is not quite the disaster that we thought maybe we can work with it but I'll leave you to play with this on your own now having seen what is possible and not catch up with you in another session

Channel: Thinklaser Limited

Views: 120,402

Keywords: Lightblade, Laser Cutting, Laser engraving, CNC Laser, Flatbed Laser, RDWorks, Laser cutting tutorials, Thinklaser, Lazer Cutter, What is a laser cutter, How does a laser cutter work, How to use a laser cutter, Laser cutting process, Laser cutter, CNC Laser cutting machine, laser cutting software, how a laser cutter works, how do laser cutters work, how does laser cutting work, what does a laser cutter do?, Laser cutting leather, Laser engraving leather

Id: U3U_aTeUAFs

Length: 57min 52sec (3472 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2018