LightWELD laser welding Explanation and Real World Part

foreign hello my name is Evan I'm here at Sarah laser and I'm going to be doing a demonstration of the light weld uh handheld fiber laser welding system for you today um I've got your parts all laid out here I've uh done a little bit of testing just to verify some settings and make sure I uh I know how this part is going to go together and everything um so yeah I'll get to welding in a minute there's a few things I'm going to go over first I'm going to go over the safety aspect of welding with this fiber laser I'm going to go over how the machine operates and the hardware portions of it um and then I'll uh answer any questions if you have any and then I'll get right into welding before I start do you have any questions right off the bat foreign all right so yeah for as far as the safety goes you'll see that I'm wearing these these glasses here uh this is going to be the most critical safety feature that we're gonna need to uh use when we're welding with this um as you can tell they're very clear it almost looks like they don't have any uh any tint or filter on them but but they actually have a really really high level of filtration for this type of light um unlike your traditional arc welding process this is going to produce an infrared wavelength of light not a UV wavelength of light so uh so as far as like sunburns and stuff like that goes it's it's not uh we don't really have a risk of that happening um and like when you get your eyes burned from like TIG welding you know it feels like there's sand in your eyes kind of um and it goes away but this is a little different the infrared light can be focused by our eye uh magnified and it can do some lasting damage to our retinas and our eye so it's really important that we wear these glasses they have a special filtration uh that only allows one Photon of light for every 10 million photons of light to pass through so it's a really really high level of filtration and it's actually more than what's necessary for this but it's uh you know this is what we'll be wearing all the time when using this process um they also double as safety glasses so I just wear them around the shop they're very easy to see through um and they are uh they're also available in prescription so if you need prescription glasses you don't have to double up you can get these made in your prescription uh in addition to this it's always recommended to wear long sleeve clothing when welding although you'll find that there's no spatter with this process um and there's no sunburn risk so there's not a UV light being produced but really it's just because we're working with hot materials so it's always always good to cover your skin with non-flammable clothing and then I'm also going to be wearing this helmet you can probably tell that it's a real standard welding helmet here um underneath we're actually just going to put it on Cut mode because there is no Arc there's no UV light produced by an arc so um it's not very bright it's much dimmer than what we did with the TIG weld in fact I like to have a nice bright light source to help me see what I'm doing a little bit better um so yeah I have it on Cut mode with a shade of five um okay so here's the difference uh from the normal welding helmet you'll see we have this aluminum Shield here with another layer of uh protective glass so this glass is similar to the glasses um it serves to prevent that light from just getting in our facial area as I mentioned the glasses are protecting our eyes but it's good to just keep that light away from our face so this is an added layer of protection and then the aluminum Shield uh serves to deflect any reflected light that may occur it's only likely to occur if you're using the the welder in properly for instance you're not you're not supposed to be welding in a direction where it would aim towards yourself or towards another person but in that case this aluminum Shield would deflect any light uh because it wouldn't be focused at that point so it's not uh intense enough to do any damage to this aluminum foreign other people that are in this space say if somebody was over here you know prepping apart for welding or deburring or something all they need is the the glasses but when you're up close and Welding you'll need the glasses and the helmet uh okay so that brings me to the next point which is the space that we're welding in um so you might be used to seeing um you know tinted curtains uh in a weld shop and those serve to to block off some UV light for those who are walking by to prevent arc flash and sunburns and stuff like that but this is an infrared wavelength of light and those curtains are not going to be able to stop that this light it'll just go right through so uh what we need is some type of physical barrier to create like a laser safe environment um now this can vary from shop to shop depending on how many people you have in your shop or what your shop layout looks like uh but really what you want to try to do is have some type of uh blocked off area uh to be using the laser in um so you'll see that I'm in this in this booth here this is constructed out of aluminum it doesn't have to be aluminum it can be any like physical barrier for the light but really the point here is that if we would have a flashlight and you know turn turn around in any direction where there's people you'd want no light to escape between cracks in the walls so these panels have overlaps um it doesn't have to have a ceiling unless you have a second floor uh look back and look right in uh it doesn't have to go all the way to the floor there's some guidelines that uh Glenn who's my boss feed on this fall also that he can provide you with if you were to try to construct your own um but we also sell a modular version of this room uh that you can you know you can buy four foot wide panels and construct into the size that you might need so uh but yes as far as actually being able to use the welder in this space uh we do need some type of door switch so this is a redundant mag Reed switch there's two circuits in here so I can do welding and anybody in here that's wearing eye protection can be in here with the door closed welding and then my co-workers outside uh don't have to be wearing the glasses and if they need to tell me something say there's an emergency they could feel free to open the door and the second that that switch uh breaks contact it'll stop the laser from firing so uh so yeah this is something that's required to fire the laser um we have some laser safe acrylic Windows here so that people can monitor what's going on in here but yeah I'll have my boss send you some more information about the the cells also have any problems getting that set up [Music] okay so over here you'll see the actual oops okay uh over over here you'll see the uh the welders I have two different models here uh this is the XR model which is the the top of the line system um XR stands for extended range and that a lot that gives you a little bit more a little bit better performance with uh thinner materials such as like especially thin aluminum uh you know you can go down into 30 000 aluminum land uh we've actually done a little bit thinner but uh you know tracking in a practical sense it'll get you down in like the 30 thousands range and up to a quarter of an inch of penetration uh so this is just like a wider uh range of applications you can do but uh for most applications you're going to be fine with the base model or the XC model I'm going to be using XC for this application today uh just because it's uh it works great for this thickness of material um the XR would do everything this one can do but again if you don't need the extra extra thin side of things or you don't need a quarter of an inch of penetration you can definitely get away without spending the extra money on this one uh with with the XC um so okay so there's the XC and then there's the base model uh like well 1500 as far as the welding goes they're identical uh they weld the exact same the only difference being that the XC has a cleaning function which can uh remove discoloration from the material after welding can also clean your material before welding it has the ability to perform passivation on stainless steel so a lot of people like it for stuff like what you're doing here uh if you if you need to you know activate the material I'm not sure if this one does but uh you know for some food and medical and lab grade stuff they need to you know clean the welds afterwards um so if you're interested in the cleaning feature the XC is the one to go with if you don't care about that um you know you can even go with the base model but um but yeah so this one uh is what I'm gonna be using today as far as the uh the system here it's an air cooled fiber laser with a 1500 watt rating output power so um yeah at our at our highest energy output we're going to be 1500 watts and our minimum is going to be 150 watts it's a multi-mode laser um that's real really the difference between these this is multi mode this is a single mode laser um and yeah it's air cooled so there's two cooling fans and some heat sinks inside that'll keep it running at uh up to 100 Duty Cycles um I think it's uh it's 90 duty cycle at 90 degrees ambient temperature so it's really good really good performance it runs on single phase 220 volt power and it won't draw any more than 24 amps and uh the realistic range that you're going to be using this one in is going to be uh you know 40 000 up to about 3 16 material um actually I shouldn't say material that's how much penetration you can get so you can have control down into a 40 000 chain and uh you can get up to 3 16 penetration with it so but you're not limited to 316 material you can weld thicker stuff just not going to get full penetration with it okay so when we go about using this uh what we're gonna do is use this um settings chart comes with all the machines and you're going to use this to get your your settings pretty close the settings are really well thought out and they work extremely well I've been using this for almost two years and I still just go by this chart and then just make Minor Adjustments from there so for these parts I'm going to be using a filler wire because there's some gaps here and there and I like I just like using the filler wire when I have the opportunity to so I'm going to choose stainless steel it's going to tell me I need nitrogen gas which is what I have and then there's four different types of weld continuous wave modulation which is like a pulsed Fusion load tack or attack and spot welding and then W for wire so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go to A6 which is a wire welding mode with about one millimeter of penetration it appears that most of this material is uh you know 060 to maybe like 0.74 um so I think that this will give us plenty of penetration um if we need a little bit more power we can jump up to the next setting here but from the testing I did on one of the parts I found that the A6 setting seemed to work just fine so I'm going to just go with that one um and once you see the result if you if you say okay I need a little bit more uh penetration on that then I can turn the turn the power up too but yeah so A6 in the setting you see I have that dialed in right here on the machine and uh I I changed this setting by uh holding down these buttons in order to change the first character a c e f so I'll go back to a and then the second character I will change by this momentarily pressing these buttons so you see A6 gives us a power of 600 watts if I need more penetration I'll just turn it up we'll turn it down and then I can memorize uh the power too so let's say I find that 550 watts is actually better I can then hold down these two buttons and override the preset with that power so now when I go back to that setting it'll uh it'll save that power and I'm going to revert it back to its Factory just so I don't forget later but I'll hold it for six seconds and it'll revert back to its factory setting um okay and then another uh there's two more controls here on the front panel this is wobble length and wobble frequency so uh the laser beam is very small when it's static so there's a feature inside the welding gun that scans the laser side to side and that creates a little bit wider of a weld profile now those settings are already dialed in in these preset modes but we have some control over it so we have plus or minus 50 percent control on the width and how and the frequency or how fast it goes back and forth um I'm gonna just leave it alone but sometimes I'll use the width on an outside corner I'll increase it to get a little bit better radius on the corner but I'm going to leave this setting exactly how the factory uh preset is so that you can see how how well it works just out of the box with no chain just made to the setting foreign okay and then over here we have the wire feeder um so it's a separate unit that feeds the wire I have a couple of them there's actually three here just because I have different materials this one's mild Steel aluminum and I have stainless out of sight here um but yeah so this is just a uh basically uh it has Drive rollers and and it has your wheel of wire in here so you can fit a 10 pound or a 33 pound spool on those and I use o45 diameter with this process um you can use thinner wire or a thicker wire but the o45 seems to be the sweet spot in my opinion so that's what I typically use um and the Machine just plugs into uh this port the welder connects to this port and when you have the wire feeder turned on actually maybe this one's better nope it does not quite good hold on okay so uh you just turn it on and then you'll set your wire speed here and it's also um drawn out in this this chart so with that setting it's recommending the wire speed of uh like 65 to 70 centimeters per minute I typically run it just a little bit slower than that so I think I have uh the other wire Peter down here that I'm actually using let's see I'm going to run it a little slower than that at um I think 60 centimeters per minute yeah 60. but uh yeah so you can just use whatever wire you need for your application so I in this case I have 3080 stainless in my wire feeder something that's really interesting about this process is that the um the wire feeding the wire feeder sets your travel speed so so the wire is coming through this this uh cable here and I'm just going to put my finger on the end but when I when I pulled this trigger that Through the Wire you see how if I keep my fingers still the gun actually moves away at the speed of the wire that that's how it that's how it works when you're welding so so you basically just touch the surface put a little bit of pressure inwards and then when you fire the laser it'll feed the wire and start pushing you along it'll kind of uh tell you what's needed to go but you can just feel it so it's really easy and it provides super consistent uh fallow speed which is the main thing that you need to get consistent results with this okay um and then this is the last uh or the second is one of the last pieces of Hardware to talk about this is the gas regulator we're just going to regulate the pressure here we don't need a flow regulator uh the the pressure regulator is actually what we need and we change the pressure from between like 15 to 40 PSI just depending on what you're working with on mild steel and aluminum you can set the pressure pretty low on stainless I like to turn it up a little bit more to get some cleaner welds um so I have it at about maybe 30 PSI right now um and then yeah and then the connection to the machine it's going to be this half inch outer diameter plastic line and it's just a push to connect fitting so you just cut it the length push it into the back of the machine and uh yeah and as I mentioned we're going to be using nitrogen for this nitrogen is the preferred shielding gas for most materials with the laser process um since we don't have a Tungsten then we don't uh we don't have the problem uh so if you try to use nitrogen with a TIG it would it would give you problems because of the tongues then would have rode into the weld but with the laser we are free to use nitrogen and it's better anyways so yeah so we have nitrogen here um another good thing about nitrogen is it's far cheaper than Argon okay so this is the welding gun there's a few things to mention about this um so you'll see that the angle built into the gun that's that's the preferred angle we keep this level with the surface that's the preferred angle to be welding with there's some uh wiggle room though you don't have to move spot on you can do quite a bit out of position and it'll work just fine um there's two triggers there's one here that flows gas we're shielding gas out of a nozzle and then the second trigger fires the laser and food you can fill our wire through Fusion welding it's not going to feed the filler wire you just end up taking the uh the wire feeder system off and then feel happy we are it's a novel without that wire feeder on it but this application we're definitely going to use the wire just because there's little gaps all over here and there so it's nice and tight okay um there's two consumable items so the first being this copper nozzle since we do touch the surface when we're welding with this uh this will eventually wear down although it wears very slowly I make them last months especially with the wire feed it wears even slower because the wire is actually touching the surface and not the nozzle uh and the second consumable item is going to be a protective glass window called a cover slide and this is located about here in this assembly and it serves to prevent any contaminants from accessing the focusing lens the focusing ones which is uh located about here in the gun and so it's just a sacrificial piece of glass it's uh cheaper to replace than the focusing ones and easier to replace so uh yeah this is about 13 bucks located right here it's really easy to change out um and yeah I changed those maybe once every week or two weeks just kind of depends on the cleanliness of the parts that I have the stainless steel it really doesn't dirty that lens at all um it's more like galvanized material uh where you'll see that get very kind of more regularly hey can you show them the different nozzles yeah so there's a couple different types of the copper nozzles so I'll just go over the two that that I like um there's like four different types of novels but uh this one is the let me zoom in here a little bit so this is the wire feeder nozzle you'll see it has that little groove on the end and uh that's how the the wire stays located and it sits in that Groove and stays centered so the laser can hit it but I use this one for most applications even without the wire it's just a nice narrow point so it gets into the tight spaces and that little Groove actually helps when you're um like riding on an outside corner it yeah it kind of locked on there but I use this one a lot and then the other one that I use is this fourth tip there's two different widths of this one now this is the small one of the two but this one's also good for outside pointers um it'll kind of lock on there nicely and keep the center and it also works well for spot welding so you can do spot welding like this where you actually hear through the first piece of material into the second piece uh and in that case I use this Fork nozzle to create a little bit of clearance for the weld to be able to grow and they're really easy to change they uh they just unthread and then you can you know let on the new one and then also one more thing to mention on those uh nozzles is the cleaning cleaning function so when you're using the cleaning function there's a different set of nozzles uh this one is for outside corners again with that Groove you know rides on this your head this one is for butt welds um it will keep your proper Focus distance on a flat surface and this one's for inside Corners so now for cleaning on an inside corner it will get down in there right in the corner the whole purpose would be hot between these nozzles the Behind These nozzles and and why you touch the surface during this process is that we're dealing with a focused beam of light here so we want to have the proper distance from our surface so uh this distance is the proper distance so if we were trying to manually hover it at the right distance there'd be too inconsistent it would be out of focus so touching the surface make sure that that Focus distance is proper and then it's also a safety feature so when you're touching the surface it senses that contact through a wire that's plant on my paper over there and it won't let me fire the laser unless I'm touching the circuit so I can't just buy the laser at whatever I feel like thanks um okay any questions about uh any of the safety the hardware or how this is operated I have a question yeah um I was under the understanding you know I've worked with fiber lasers and um they give up again so I forget what material you're cutting or well or you know cutting users that it has to be ventilated as a Valium yeah I would I would recommend ventilation with any type of welding there's gases released during Big Welding and MIG welding that you don't want to be breathing also um but yeah I mean I think welding stainless there can there's um I think what is it like filmium or something that you don't want to be breathing in but that's the same with any kind of welding so I I have a ventilation system here and I definitely recommend that no matter what you're doing awesome um but yeah I mean galvanized galvanized is one of the other ones that that you don't want to be breathing in the smoke from the uh the zinc and the galvanized uh that's that's really a real bad one too so um yeah whenever I'm doing galvanized or something that off gases a lot I actually wear a ventilated helmet as well we do government additional to remove that value of chromium okay I admiring her this is not an enclosed system when you're doing it in laser it's different obviously yeah yeah our current needs new galvanized we have a filtration system foreign yeah kind of just depends on your situation though you know like if you're in a ventilated enough space and I think you'll be fine but I'm in pretty tight Quarters here this is the biggest box that I'm in is eight by ten so uh so yeah it's it's important for me to have this this actual you know I have the stream extractor that I just kind of positioned at my world uh but yeah as far as as far as that goes it's you know it's no different than any other type of world um yeah any other questions before I start welding these [Music] that there was like uh Reliance and everything uh and also the nozzle I was wondering if laser would actually add or reduce the amount of contaminants that would be in the world uh add or reduce the amount of contaminants in the weld is that what you said sorry it's kind of quiet it sounds awful yeah it's the laser welding that reduces the amount of contaminants in the in the world yes yeah it's it's much it provides uh much less of a chance of um uh inclusions and porosity and and all that um I'm gonna draw you a picture uh kind of kind of try to explain what laser welding is doing um in comparison to your take a MIG welding process um this I think this really helps out kind of understanding the process a little bit better the real stuff I'm simplifying it a lot here uh but just I think it should make some sense so I'm just going to draw a cross section of a butt joint and this one's going to be laser and this one will be uh tag slash make your traditional art building process might vary a little bit but overall it's the same um Okay so foreign okay so uh with the TIG welding and your traditional Arc processor you're going to have your Shield gas here you're gonna have your Arc from the surface uh transmitting electrons that's the main difference we're welding with electrons here versus protons with the laser and we're going to start heating the material up from this centralized point from that heat is going to be transmitted into the material like this your weld will end up you know shake something like this because we're starting the weld from a central point and working our way outwards any contaminants on the surface can become included into the weld um so it's important to have a nice clean material when you're TIG welding also the contaminants can disrupt The Arc and create an unstable Arc which creates uh less of a not as good of a weld with uneven penetration and stuff like that and then another big factor here is that we're actually wasting most of the energy when we're TIG welding while MIG welding although we'll make most of the energy we're inputting is actually uh overheating the surrounding material not where the weld is happening so it's wasting a lot of energy um in our heat affected zone is very large we have a lot of our material that actually has its structure and spectral Integrity affected it becomes more brittle when it overheats and then as when the material is uh it causes more warping also because the material shrinks more up here at the top surface where we have a large area of melted material and less at the rate where it's just a small amount of relative material so I so it'll shrink more here and then our material will become warped this also requires a lot of skill you have to have the you know your standoff distance has to be just right consistent uh you know your constant grind needs to be good it can't be dirty um it's fairly slow this process the laser is totally different um it actually welds more from the inside of the material out so the surface contaminants aren't as big of an issue uh basically basically we're going to have our light focusing at in a in a hourglass shape like this this is the focus point um but I'm just going to draw it pretty simple this will make it simple as like a dashed line for the laser beam what it's going to do is it's going to pierce the tunnel through the material or into the material depending on if we get the penetration or not it'll Pierce through like a laser cutting machine um and then the light is going to bounce around inside and penetrate from the inside out uh it's it's got um about 200 times the energy density of your TIG welding process so we have much less wasted heat with the laser a heat effective zone is very local to the actual weld and maybe we have affected material just right here and then because we are not relying on that well to grow we're just going to get right to the point well our weld is going to be a little bit more of like an hourglass shape like this they call it a keyhole was so the well they'll appear really small on the surface but in reality we have better penetration more even bonding throughout and then when it comes time for the material to cool and Shrink we have a lot more than even area of shrinkage top and bottom so the material doesn't work as much it stays nice and flat but yeah so the surface contaminants uh we don't really need to worry about the material being perfectly cleaned because we're actually welding for many gear now the very top surface might be affected by the cleanliness but it's not your overall your weld is not going to be affected a lot of times if I see uh contaminants on the top Surface after the weld I end up seeing it on top of the weld like we've gone on the underneath and kind of welded From Below that's really interesting um but this this is this these reasons are why this process is a lot faster uh Stronger and easier so we don't have to maintain the we don't have to worry about the arc stability there is no Arc but we don't have to worry about standoff distance because we're touching the surface and our travel speed is consistent because the live any questions about that you're welcome Okay so uh yeah so let me any other questions before I get into doing some welding we're yeah ready to go Okay cool so let me go ahead and put a glove on here and my welding helmet and just get right to it and these parts are a little bigger so I'm going to zoom out just a bit here if I'm ever out of uh camera view let me know and I'll make some adjustments so I did some testing here on this one I'm gonna go ahead and just finish off this other side here and then um I attacked up another one and I'll do this one uh in its entirety with any adjustments that we need to make any okay so uh you'll notice I'm just going to um German view here and I'll zoom in a little bit actually so I'm going to just touch the surface um and you'll see that I'll be moving at a consistent Pace uh the gaps like this these are a little bit uh more difficult to overcome the late the one thing the laser is not the best at is filling gaps but that's not to say that it can't do it it's kind of like TIG welding it just requires a little bit more skill uh you know to bridge big gaps uh so I'll start by bridging this Gap and then and then on this part here I'm just going to do a nice linear Weld and at the end I'll just kind of make a little circle see uh pulling that hole there there we go okay now you're able to bridge it it's just a little bit trickier than than the nice fit up so definitely a good setup is important is the laser welding this one similar to the the first Gap I'm just kind of kind of maneuver the gun in a way where it'll still fill up that hole so I'll just zoom in on that one for you so you can get a closer like that of these welds we've noticed uh first off the heat affected Zone in comparison to the the tig welded example very minimal I can actually uh touch the part you know uh not too close to the weld it does do that but not nearly as much as I mentioned it has about 200 times the energy density so we have a lot more of a focused Heat you're not wasting our energy uh and the rest of the material and you'll see here on the underside we're getting um good penetration I'm looking at real close here I see that it's almost full penetration so if we did want full penetration we could just turn the power up just a little bit more okay and then I'm gonna run [Music] um this part here though and his inside Corners make it really easy to get nice good gas coverage so you'll notice the world was really nice and shiny there you could see uh we actually got elected a picket Zone and even the attack World played by the thing well nice consistent heat here all the way around and then moving on to this section here foreign so it's really easy you just make sure you're at the right angle basically all I'm doing here is just making sure my gun's at the right angle and I'm trying to keep my angle to the material consistent as I go around the radio so instead of moving like this I'll try to you know walk the gun around it if I can't get to a certain point I'll just come at it from the other way and finish it off like that uh sometimes on an inside corner you might see that click on the inside of a box and then on this piece uh is this all you're doing or are you going around this yeah so you're just tacking them together okay uh is there any changes you'd like me to make from what you can see here uh if you want to because I'm gonna finish up welding this one with that pack together already uh can we get an inside view of that fully welded one the backside the other the other way thank you you want me to get more penetration on there I can turn the power up I'm at right now I'm at 600 watts out of 1500 so um you know not even passed away um that's the power range that changes anything I don't think we have any changes from that one yeah okay all right so yeah I'll just move on to the the next one then I was interesting completely wide open up this one uh had a little bit worse spit up so I might have to do a little bit of gun manipulation in this area here I was trying to get it as tight as I could but I think it looked like this one was maybe yeah but it's like a cut by hand possibly so I I know it's a little bit hard to get it perfect um oh we got a question here real quick so yeah today so um have those uh Colors oh the coloration the cleaning rubber yeah yeah we've capacitate um it's gonna be a real tricky to go inside I don't think you'll be able to do it inside but uh yeah you want me to show you a cleaning on this part right here that's a separate operation it is a separate operation yes it's real easy so you basically just uh take off the the wire feeder and then I'll I'll turn off the wire feeder in a moment here but and then I'm gonna um switch over to one of the cleaning nozzles if you go on that I like to use so I'm going to use this one and then turn off the wire feeder and then I'll show you what I'm doing on the machine here all right once again I'm just going to follow this chart so there's cleaning modes here it says P1 and P2 there's two different intensities I'm going to go to the lower intensity so I'm just going to go to P1 as my setting that gives me 15 millimeters in width of cleaning I don't need all that so I'm gonna just I'll go down to maybe 10 millimeters wide you can adjust the width uh and Power on the community as well but I'm just gonna all I did was narrow it down a little bit and I'm going to zoom in on this a little bit so you can get a good view and this has this has been proven to be able to do passivation there is a special technique you're supposed to do it from two different directions uh so if there's any little ridges on the wall you actually get the back side of it too now but yeah basically uh gets you to a nice clean furnace it's also good for aluminum you can take your oxide off the aluminum before you weld it and it can be a little tricky at the corners but you can kind of do what I'm doing there by rotating it with your pink corner all the way hopefully I'm not out of view I can't see the camera right now yeah we're good I'm not going to be replaced that nozzle need to be replaced often or no no even much less than 11 because you typically aren't using this as often and you don't have to really put any pressure down and it was kind of as long as you're touching you know they'll be able to fire the laser um so it looks like I could have used a little bit more intensity here on the palace but again you can make adjustments to all of that and even though down here on the bottom on the back side of the world hey show them the higher intensity that's one and this is also going to be the maximum width career that with the maybe adjust the camera a little off bye this is nice compared to like the acid brush technique if you're going to be doing passivation because you don't have any chemicals to clean up all you got to do is just you know go over it with the laser and as long as you're okay with the uh being able to see you know the Laser's path and it works really great another cool thing you can do with the cleaning is um like if you want to put part numbers on something if I can turn the width of that wobble all the way down to nothing so I have it at zero right now and let's just say I want to make this part number uh one so that wasn't there the best handwriting there with the laser but um you know you could you could mark if you need to uh you can like put your name on your tools or you know make it put a part number on something and you can also scribe a line this is kind of a cool use uh customer after you've showed me this and I thought you know that's a great idea so let's say you want to describe a line you have the laser to guide you you know right right on uh where you need to be so you can kind of put the laser there at the front put the laser at the end kick this your guide however you need and then you know multiple precise line that's in the material pretty good does the surface gets hard when you clean uh a little bit but you know I'm touching it not as much as well okay so I'm gonna move on to uh welding finishing off that other piece that I already tacked together so let me just put my settings back there about how they were okay this Gap is larger so it's a little bit trickier you're going to go in like tax instead so it doesn't it'll get easier we have a gap there too so go over that a little bit more really another way to do it is you can kind of add some material on one side add some material on the other side you're going to mix it a little smaller of a gap the reason the gaps are difficult is because since we need to maintain contact with the surface in order to fire the laser you know when you go over the Gap you're technically like leaving the the surface in the middle so you kind of have to make sure the wire stays in the weld pool so that that's kind of something that you have to learn to overcome the tip that makes it easier to handle gaps all right um not really because the it depends on the gap size right so if the Gap is the size of the wire or smaller then you can just go right over it but if it's any bigger than that that wire just wants to go right through the Gap so the tip design doesn't really change that so yeah you have to you have to manipulate it or you know when you cut this pipe maybe introduce a little instead of having it just a 90 you could have it kind of drop down where this uh Bend ends and then uh that'll make it a little smaller that'd be probably the easiest easiest way to go about it like all along here there's actually a gap just about the whole way along here sorry the laser shut off because I'm not my Surface must be a little dirty I'm not making that contact so it kind of I thought I left the surface uh probably best to just put the clamp on the actual part in that sense so I'll just let this clamp like right on the part that'll probably make it easier interesting foreign so I only did like two small attacks on either side I didn't put attack in the middle foreign so what it's going to do is leave me an uninterrupted um well like a nice nice uh cleaning service to weld when you tack weld in the middle a bunch since we are touching the surface it kind of ends up being like a little bump in the road but you know I'm just I can like one hand this and you know what the product if I need to or I could also use my stuff at hand as a develop stability which is what I do a lot of times foreign foreign foreign you were saying there's no splatter but what is that just photons Oh you mean the the little Sparks yeah uh that's just like contaminants off the surface burning off uh from what I understand possibly like small uh particles of metal but it's not um you know it's nothing that sticks to the surface like we won't find any splatter on the surface or uh you know there's no ball of that material that'll like jump and hit your skin or anything like that so your other hand does not doesn't get no yeah I'm manipulating this part by hand a lot of times like even where I just you know where I just welded it's warm and I wouldn't want to stay there forever but I'm not like uh you know smoking my glove or melting my skin or anything and if I touched it with my bare skin you know I would burn myself but a little bit away it's fine but your the hand that you're holding the the trigger with doesn't get hit with those that sweater oh no no I I don't feel anything at all and it's probably recommended to wear a Glock here too but I've just been so a lot of times I actually don't wear gloves but this part has enough welding on it to where it actually does warm up a little bit most Parts like this part uh won't well but won't warm up enough to where I even need to wear gloves uh unless I touch the actual weld area um like yes I'm accustomed to not wearing gloves but I wouldn't recommend that foreign that that clamp is just to ensure that the welder is in contact with the yeah so you see the lights not flashing and if I touch the surface oh the wire must be uh they're touching the surface somewhere somehow it's making a ground but anyways typically the uh the the clamp on the surface you know it it'll Flash the light like this and then only allow me to fire the laser in that circumstance so right now I'm not touching the surface where that clamp is and that can't fire the laser looks like a safety feature yeah but it's also it's also to ensure that you have a good weld because if you're not touching the surface you're not going to be in a good enough Focus distance and that uh that hourglass shaped you know the focus distance here's the here's the lens here so the light comes in here and then it's going to go and focus at a certain point and then continue on its path and be unfocused so unless we're at this point we're actually out of focus oh wow I drew that completely out of frame didn't we um Okay so you have your focusing lens here and your light is coming in here and then it's going to end up focusing and then continuing on its path so we have our Focus point which is where we want to be from our surface so that that tip ensures that we're at the right distance from our focusing lens if we were you know off in our our surface was actually here uh the spot would be wider which means we have less energy uh density so we might not be able to even melt the metal at a certain distance away we have to be within a you know a certain area in order to actually have a well to happen well then when your tip wears out you'll know it because it'll stop welding yeah um that's the theory but in reality I've never had one wear out enough to do that um it would apparently from what I'm told by some people at the company the manufacturer um stainless and Mild steel can be up to about four millimeters out of focus before your welds are you know not gonna work good um so imagine wearing this down uh you know almost 3 16 of an inch that's a lot of wear and I've never had one wear that much um unless I damaged it like I dropped it and dented it to the point where I had to like grind It Off um aluminum it's a little bit more picky the focus distance on aluminum is more critical so uh you know the wear could become a factor on aluminum but with stainless and Mild steel you're not going to have that problem uh uh with just a little bit of use it'll take a lot of use for that um okay so I showed you this part I'm going to move on to uh this part and this is a little thinner looks like the only thing I did when I did this part was I did the same setting but I turned the power down to 550 Watts so the only difference here uh I just went down to 550 that's it a 50 watt decrease in power to probably get away with a little less maybe but that's in the work fine so I'm just going to go with that [Music] yeah one second here we go and we'll play I can find bring my ground clap I'm wondering if I have a flip in that wire somewhere I'm gonna have to check that later we're getting uh not having the best time contacting right now as you can see after you know welding those four corners it's it's not even I can get within an inch of everything practically with my fingers um but let me show you that up close yeah I got full penetration I could turn the power down more if I needed thank you so I'll do that on the next one I'll turn the power down a bit actually you know what I'm going to do I'm going to show you the increased wobble we'll have a couple more all right I know your paper said that one of these is pre-welded but none of them were they were all um unwelded that wasn't sure exactly what they're trying to um replicate but yeah so all I'm going to do is I'm gonna turn my wobble up 30 percent and leave the power alone and see if I get a little bit better radius on the corner okay I could use a little bit less power so I'm going to go down another 50 Watts another question would it be better to weld it from the inside or from the outside on that uh really it depends on what you're doing with this so if you know which side is going to be visible if it matters if the you know the well um is smooth on smoother on the inside or the outside I'm not sure exactly what this is I know it's some type of baffle but I don't know what the orientation of how it mounts is you know it's not an aesthetic part it's just wondering if it would be easier it would show up a couple inside ones yeah I'll do some on the inside it's just kind of up to you I guess uh you know the results look good on the outside I would say it's fine but it is always a little trickier to balance on an outside edge than it is on the inside from the back a little harder to show you on the camera on the inside but as far as the results there um no problem getting it from the inside okay all right now I'm going to zoom out I can't figure out where the camera is like there that's a good angle it goes from the inside and see the outside then have the uh the gray the gray color on it as opposed to the um well that's on the outside I like I like from the outside better I think personally this is structural it's not it'll be plenty strong either way and then another thing you can do I'm just going to show you this is kind of a real interesting feature um I know you this is not aesthetic but uh this is a cool feature that you can do here I'm gonna share my screen with you is uh you can make your own settings so can you see this computer screen now yeah yeah okay so I'm gonna make a setting here um okay so this is a modulation setting this is a user interface that you can use just by plugging a computer into the welder uh so I'm making a setting here and I can save it so I'll just click save 650 watts two millimeters wide I'm pulsing it three times a second at 75 duty cycle and there's a lot of other settings you can make here but this is just one I want to show you it ends up looking really nice I've saved it so now it's on the the welder saved onto the welder I can use it again later without using the computer um and then this is going to give me this pulse effect which sometimes they're used for smaller pieces like this to limit the heat input also a little bit too much power on that one let's turn the power down a little bit so now I'm adjusting it from the the welder that pulsing you know reduces our overall heat input it also allows us to go a little I Didn't Do It Good on that one this is kind of a tricky part to show this to you and actually because it's a small weld but I'll show you on a bigger piece so you can get an idea what it what it is cool so okay so I'm going to show you on on this piece what I'll do is I'll slow down my wire speed a little bit and then I have that Wilson action so I have my wire feed consistent there but the actual laser is pulsing uh and I can I can make adjustments to that you know I'm actually going to make a little bit more of adjustment I want more Duty Cycles so I'll show you I'm okay with the uh Power and everything but I want more time on with the laser each pulse so I'll go 10 there save it with this kind of equipment huh like tack welding oh you can do spot welding and I'll show you that that but this is just pulsing the laser so you limit your overall heat input whereas all the welding you've seen me do so far the laser has been on the whole time that I'm welding this one the laser is the whole thing three times a second so I can limit my heat input but also it doesn't go a little slower without adding too much heat foreign there's you know the purpose of it is that it'll limit your heat input so this helps you with real thin materials with pulsing the laser um and then the for the for the spot welding piece there um I'm gonna I'm gonna remove the the wire feed here and then turn off my wire feeder so I'll go ahead and put this this nozzle on also and then I'm going to use a setting for tack welding so right here on this chart the T modes mean tack weld so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a piece of 18 gauge looks like and then go to a piece of uh a bit very much so I'll just lay these on top of each other and the attack mode that I'm going to choose is time so I'll just fire the laser and keep the button pressed until it turns itself off and then I'll move on to my next pack globe so to set the setting I'm going to choose tack weld and then I'll choose how deep I want to penetrate so I want to go through the first piece which is maybe 40 or 50 000. and most of the way through the eighth inch so let's say about 160 000 so I'll go to A5 1150 Watts I'm just changing my settings again just how I did before A5 1150 Watts and then yeah so I'm just going to basically Pierce right through into the second piece um that one worked really nice thank you that was through the thin into the thick and then I'm going to try some uh through the thick into the thin and see how that works perfect so you know the depth of penetration is what's right setting is not necessarily or material thickness so uh you know I did it both ways it's been the thick and thick to thin there's uh thicker to thin okay then on the back and then through the thin into the thick and uh it's a nice strong uh tack welds and then they're spot welds and then there's another feature which is really cool um I'll just do it on two thin pieces but this is something they do in the automotive World a lot which is um I'm gonna make a setting that's going to have a zigzag uh spot weld this is It's called in the automotive world they're called laser seam stepping uh that's how they basically Bond the panels of the cars together rather than the traditional spot weld I'm going to go to user continuous wave I'm going to make my wobble link I'm going to Max it out it doesn't have to do but I'm going to do it to exaggerate the effect and I'm going to make the frequency of the wobble really low so let's do maybe two times per second that should be enough power and yeah so I'll just save that and then um yeah let me put the camera back basically in this with this mode I'm gonna have the laser wobbling side to side really slowly and I'm going to move along so it'll make like a zigzag I'm going to back it up with another piece of metal in case I go all the way through I don't want to stick this to my table so check this out this is one of my favorite Parts about breakfast right there it's so cool and I figured it out it could use a little bit more power now let's just turn the power up a little bit you get a lot of surface area of weld instead of like your track your traditional spot weld where you just have a little spot actually oh there you go that fits about perfect it just barely Stuck To That Base piece that's almost full penetration it's perfect but I thought that was really nice all right any other questions you'll be sending us back all those uh Parts uh for us to check out too right yeah yeah I used one of uh one of each for testing but I'll send you back all the other ones you will also send you the recording too yep president yeah yeah I got a little room full of impressed people here so yeah thank you awesome yeah no problem yeah thanks I'm a actor director and cameraman all right all right I'll send all this stuff back to you then and uh and uh yeah I'll box it up and get it shipped out awesome thank you no problem uh yeah if you have any questions okay yeah all right that's cool all right thank you guys thank you you're welcome have a good one I want to hear from from our uh

Channel: Serra LightBOT - LightWELD Channel

Views: 52,657

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Id: qp33j_cT-BU

Length: 78min 6sec (4686 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2023