Lightburn hints : Getting the best cut settings for material

in this video we're going to show you how you can work out the best cut settings for your laser in light burn [Music] hi my name is gil and in this light burn hints video we're going to look at how you can work out the best cutting settings for your laser i'll be using my in blazer 2 diode laser for this tutorial but you can use this method with any laser that you're using all you need to do is adjust the settings depending on the power and speed settings for your specific laser regardless if you're using a diode or co2 laser being able to work out the most effective settings for your laser is going to make things easier on your wallet and time now this is not going to be a one shot deal depending on the material that you're working with you might want to use this procedure to work out the settings every material has a different threshold when it comes to power and speed but once you've done this test a few times you might surprise yourself at how fast you can tune in your laser now before we jump straight into light burn let me quickly invite you to hit that subscribe button and bell icon so you don't miss out on any of the upcoming hints and tutorials based around light burn and i would love it if you could come along to the laser live streams that we host on this channel over there you can actually show off your successful projects and meet other fellow laserologists who are exploring what they can do with lasers the link to the group is in the description below and i look forward to seeing what you create with your laser okay let's jump into light burn so we can explore how you can tune in your laser to cut material in the best way possible so this is one of the most requested tips that i've been asked over the last couple of months a lot of people come up to me and ask me if they said gil great we love your tutorials just we want to know how to be able to work out the material settings for something that isn't listed in the light burn library so over here you can see we've got the light burn library on the in blazer 2 there's actually a list of material that is recommended for the laser if you're using a different laser you may have material libraries like that if not you would want to create your own material libraries with all the different settings so you don't have to come into the cut layers every time let's say we get a square here and then we've got to open it up and start typing in well i remember that was kind of 1200 power 52 and it gets messy so if you haven't been introduced to it before check out this video that i have all about the materials library it goes through how to actually create your own different materials within the library how to modify settings how to create your own new settings you can check out this video with the link that's right here but what we're going to do now is actually work through how to go ahead and find the correct settings so that you can add them into the material library with whatever piece of material that you want now the real trick to effective laser use is to be able to go and work out two key settings and that happens to be your speed and your power those two things combined will actually allow you to create the fastest job possible with the results that you want i know some people might have a laser that's 40 watt 80 watt you can crank up that power you can just punch through whatever material you want but in a lot of ways there's some setbacks to just cranking up the power one is you're pushing your laser element a lot harder than you possibly need to you may also be running the job a lot slower or faster than you need being able to find that sweet spot in your laser will also allow you to not only get the jobs done quickly but also less stress on your machine and i don't know about you but i want my machine to keep working because without it i'm not able to get my jobs done so right now we're gonna go forward and work out how to work out the sweet spot for both your speed and your max power there are many different ways people do this i'm going to show you the way i was taught and i use this quite often let's go through the methodology first and i'm going to apply it to a project so i'm going to just quickly select this guy get rid of him now when you actually are working on a project there are two main shapes that your laser is going to try to create the first one is a area i'm just going to turn this to black so you guys can see it is areas that have really sharp turns and in this case we've got a 45 degree sharp corner which if you're doing signage if you're doing photos you will definitely be able to use a lot of that those kind of shapes and we use them all the time you can grab these shapes you can create new shapes out of it the i guess the issue that i'm trying to share with you here is even if you make a shape that's like this design you have these really sharp turns and that's one of the areas where if your laser is not dialed in correctly you may lose the effect and the result that you actually want especially when you're cutting through material the other shape that you will use a lot are curves especially in circles like this so you've got a laser and the laser head is moving let's say in a clockwise area what we're actually finding is that as the laser head is moving around it's changing both the x and y geometry in the work area and again you want to make sure that's dialed in so that you're getting the cleanest cut possible so this is the shape that i use to test out my speed and power let me get rid of these both these guys and introduce you to what i call the cutting bullet so i start off with a square and then i grab a circle and by holding down the shift key when i do this i actually create [Music] kind of a little bit like a bullet shape these two elements i'm just going to make this a little bit smaller because we don't need it that big these two elements combined will allow me to test these speed and power settings and if i can get a clean cut using this shape i know i'm in business i'm going to weld these things together by using the weld tool and this shape i'm going to just make it as small as possible you don't need a big shape to actually test this out if you've got lots of material that you're cutting you might want to actually make an array so you can test different speeds make it as small as possible on a piece of material and then what i do is i select that piece of material come into the cut layers editor make sure that it's online which it is you can see here it's actually on three passes as i said i use a diode laser this method you can use on diode co2 if you want to try cutting with a fiber but i know five it doesn't really cut or any type of laser the methodology works right across the board i'm actually going to use a piece of cardboard that was given to me when i was working at a school i believe they were used to keep tests flat so the students wouldn't see the questions beforehand now this material as you can see is kind of like it's a whole lot of fiber squished so i know that this is a real fibrous material why that's important is the fact that this material will need to be really precisely cut there will be some fibers that won't cut as easily as others and it's a little bit like mdf if you've ever put mdf in a diode laser or if you've cut it on a co2 laser at a very low power or really really quickly you'll sometimes find that you've got to do another pass because some areas are not as equally manufactured when they were making the material i've cut this before i know that it can cut but i don't remember the settings at all and i'm actually going to cheat it a little bit i know it's paper so i'm going to go into the library settings here and i see this corrugated card it says three mil six mil i'm gonna try putting these results in first or these settings not results hopefully we'll get the results this corrugated card three mil line we're gonna assign it to layout now i know this card is only a one mil so i'm going to go to the material and the first thing i'm going to do is change it to one mil so i know it's in focus pull up this cut settings editor and these settings already talking to me what i can see here is that first of all we need two passes to cut the material the speed is at 300 so it's going quite slow and the max max power is at a hundred we've also got the air assist on interesting in these cases i actually turned the air assist off simply because on my machine my air assist is so powerful sometimes if i don't use tabs it'll knock it out but you know what i'm going to keep it on why not that's what's recommended i'm going to assign those at 300. thank you so much i'm actually going to grab this piece i'm going to hit command d and duplicate it i'm just going to move it up here in fact you know what why am i doing it that way why don't we do it the smart way let's use the array tool good old array tool and we want to put another one we're gonna do four tests now i'm gonna select the second one i'm gonna put it on the next layer i'm gonna grab it grab the third one put it on the third layer and we're gonna also do that for the fourth layer so i've got four separate layers this one's a fill i'm going to change it to a line and i can see here i've got to do some adjustments so the next one is 200 i actually like that the assist is on but we're going to make it to two passes we're just going to make sure we'll see if that works now it's 200 300 i'm going to do the next one at 100 so we're going to call the speed 100 we're slowing it all the way down we're going to make the max speed power though max power gill 102 and i'm actually going to i'm going to keep it at two passes let's give it a two passes and this last one i'm feeling this a little bit i'm gonna it's potluck so let's see what happens we're gonna go 100 but we're going to bring this down to 200 and we're going to do it at three passes i just want to see whether or not it's going to work well or not let me just see we've got it doesn't work ah a little bit of a bug there that's okay we'll let jason know because i have different results on different layers i'm going to just use the text here and i'm going to put in 300 by 100 by 2. we'll be able to see the result i'm just going to change that to another layer just because that's going to be text and you know what we don't need it to be 110 we can go that really fast so we'll go 2000 all we need to do is actually just mark it i'm just going to double check that we've all got them on two passes that's correct so let's grab this again we'll duplicate it we'll move it up here our second one is going to be 200 [Music] excellent deselect it [Music] on our third one i'm just going to check again we are still on two layers [Music] we'll make that 100 and we'll just quickly select that again and duplicate it and i believe that this is a 200 layer [Music] but that's three passes [Music] now that we've created this we can send this to the laser this way we've got a grid that we'll be able to work with and find out what those results are so let's send this to the laser we're going to come back and we'll take a look at those results [Music] [Music] so we have a number of things here with the results you can see here that at 300 millimeters per minute we add 100 power for the diode laser and with two passes we have a piece that's still there it didn't come all the way through so that that one's a little bit like a uh you know it didn't work out but at 200 right here that went through 200 mils at 100 obviously 100 given the fact that it's moving slower it definitely cut through and in fact it cut through on the two and then we actually cut through as well at the 200 mils per minute 100 we actually added a three we just did it as a guess so all these three worked to be honest with you i would continue this test what i would be looking at now is i would make another row here and i'll be actually looking at the space between the 200 and the 300 mils per minute so i'd be thinking about testing 250 a hundred by two see if that cuts through i'd actually also be looking at seeing whether or not we can get 200 at one one pass see if that works that would is actually where i want to aim at for the results and i just keep refining i keep putting the material in i keep running these tests you can see how clean these tests are they all came out really really well and once i've actually got that result i can then create my own settings for that piece in the material library so that every time i put this piece of material in we have that result i already have results in the sense of 200 ml per minute by a hundred by two if i was going to do job right now that works really well for me it's all about how much you want to refine it so that you can get your laser to work as a tightly honed machine as opposed to just running power and powering through alright now you can set up your project settings to cut material in the fastest time possible you can also let me know how this process goes as well as any other areas within light burn you might want help with in the comments below now i'm gonna go and put the finishing touches on some of my laser projects so while i do that feel free to check out some of these laser tutorials and project videos right here and i can't wait to see the amazing things that you're going to make with your laser see you soon with the next light burn hints video [Music] you

Channel: Laser Livestream - Laser projects & tutorials

Views: 68,093

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Id: iRoj4if51Xs

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 02 2022