Marking metal and more with the Longer Ruby Pulsed IR Module

hello everyone welcome back to the workshop and today I'm taking a look at something different yet again and uh this has to do with an IR module for an open frame laser I've had a lot of people ask me my opinions on them in the past from various manufacturers and I haven't really been able to speak to that because haven't had the need for one haven't had the chance to play with one well that's all changed longer has sent me out their 2 wat IR module they're calling this the Ruby module and uh we are going to be setting this up on the longer B1 that I have that originally came with the 20 W blue light laser and uh it should be a simple drop in and then we'll get it set up see what it can do and uh we'll check it out so if that interests you you want to see how it goes stay tuned we're going to jump right into it all right so I have the machine set up here on the open workbench and uh we still have the existing 20 W module in here so uh a couple things now this is what came in my kit it was pretty much just the module now for focusing it does have a little flip down foot that comes down and you do want to make sure that it gets down all the way because these IR layers have a very very finite Focus point and it'll go in and out of focus very easily so you want to make sure this folds down and kind of locks in place you'll be able to lower it down on the uh the uh slot there and tighten up the screw again then flip this back up uh so that is fairly straightforward focusing on this one and uh really similar module it's a little bit smaller than the 20 W uh the fan is exposed up top so we're just going to need to swap this module out and basically swap the cable and that should be it for the install so let's go ahead and get that done so yeah that is really about it um just need to to be able to tighten this thumb screw holds it into that doveet tail joint and then we'll be able to flip this lever down to where our object is set it down on top tighten that back up and then we can flip this back out of the way that's going to be able to set our focus on any materials now you will want to of course be running some sort of spoil board here and the nice thing about the 1064 NM wavelength is it really doesn't interact with natural materials like wood so uh we'll actually be able to use a wood spoil board for this and then be able to set our metal objects on top of that and then we shouldn't have any issues of burning now there aren't any glasses sent with this and because it is a different wavelength than your regular uh blue light diode you are going to want to make sure you have some eye protection for this and so that's one of the things I like about the free mascot uh Series 5 or or or style 5 frame is that they cover from 190 to 550 nanm as as well as 800 to 1100 nanom so these will work with both your regular module the 455 nanom blue light as well as the 1064 infrared light for these and these fit fairly well over my prescription glasses so uh just keep that in mind when you're swapping out to these you do probably want to update your eye eye protection if you're just using the stock ones that come with these lasers uh just to protect your eyes as well so uh the next thing you do is just make sure that it still works fine in lightburn we'll get that going and then we'll start testing it on a few materials right so I've got the laser head installed and lightburn is uh seeing the laser just fine I created a secondary profile for the IR module based on the original 20 W uh profile so as we go through it if we make any changes it'll just stick on that one that's something I might recommend you do if you're getting this as well and want to switch between the two now one thing you may notice like this other module the fan stays on the whole time it's not terribly loud but you know it is a wine that's kind of sitting there um might get to you after a while and that's just one thing I would love to see longer do is maybe have that with a a PID sensor or something that can wind it up when it senses heat or power going to the module and then winding it down when it's cooled off but it is what it is uh now one thing you'll notice hopefully you can see it here is there is a little red dot uh marking there and as I bring the module down it gets a little more in focus and that is to kind of help us with the alignment now this beam is is not visible to the naked ey so uh obviously we can't see it you can't use a power on laser for the framing but uh the Red Dot uh should allow us to do the framing as well so I'm going to start out I've got this thin stainless steel card here we're going to do a test grid on it um there were no material setting set with this so I'm just going to be kind of guessing based on a little bit of Internet research and my experience we'll see if we can dial in some engraving settings at least starting out with stainless steel and we'll go from [Music] there [Music] all right so our test finished up and looks like we have some decent results to go by so I ran this from 500 mm a minute on up to 3,500 mm a minute and from 10 to 100% power and hopefully as you can see there we have a decent gradient it does kind of fall off a little bit up here as you see in that 10% they they're even just kind of Disappearing and and uh down here it's not so dark that it seems overly inflated so that's a pretty decent range you have some darks some Tans and then just some really light markings and so I uh will play around with that a little bit to see if we can do some designs on some other stainless steel but this will uh at least give us a ballpark to where to start with for that so one of the metals that we aren't able to mark with the standard blue light laser is aluminum now this is an aluminum sheet spoil board at least I'm assuming it is it's not magnetic it's very lightweight so I'm going off the assumption that this is aluminum uh and this is bar aluminum now with the the blue 455 Nom wavelength laser we can clean off anodization or any sort of painted coating that's on here but with this one we should be able to natively mark this material so uh I want to go ahead and throw this in there and run a similar speed and power test and see what our results are [Music] right so the aluminum panel finished and we do have a grid here if I can get it to where it's not too blown out for you but uh there is definitely some variation I also inrease the line interval because on the last one uh I noticed that we were getting some lines and there may still be some in here so that's talking to the finer dot point of these IR modules but what we can see here is that down here we again we did it from 500 to 3500 mm per minute and then from 10 to 100% power and what you're kind of going to see hopefully here is this kind of band here of really nice White markings whereas here gets a little bit kind of almost tan as if it's like overb bured and then up here or not getting full Corners so you know we have a decent range here that I would say like 30% power and 2,000 mm a minute uh is is really white maybe even 2500 and 40% power kind of in those ranges up here where we getting the best overall uh White colors so if I can get that to focus on there for you hopefully you can kind of see that range and uh what is possible on aluminum so it's not going to be so much colored as it's going to be more of just a white etching on there but definitely allows you to now Mark bare aluminum with this module all right so I don't have a huge piece of brass but I do have this section here so going to see if we can do some quick tests on this cuz I also do have some brass coins but I want to try to dial in some settings first so this will be kind of tricky on this thin strip but we'll give it a shot and see how it goes [Music] [Music] all right so we did get some results off of the brass strip and uh we have a bit of a gradient here now due to the limited space I just went from 500 to, 1500 millimeters a minute and then again 10 to 100% power and also shrunk down the square size and the settings just to give us a ballpark but as you can hopefully see here got some decent results so what I'm looking at is if we want a fairly nice Dark One 500 mm a minute and 60% power it seems to be decent if we would just want kind of a lighter color we're going to be up around 1,10 to 15% and then we're starting to get just a little bit of weird reddish tones out here in uh the 100% power um I'd have to do a little more playing to see what that's more about but we at least know we can do some marking on brass it's a little bit slower but uh should be able to have some decent contrast and a few varying colors using this grid all right so I do have this sheet of black acrylic uh this is able to engrave some Plastics and acrylic and so we're going to start out with black as it is usually the easiest to work with and as you can see I've used this in some other testings on lasers uh this will not necessarily be able to cut through the acrylic this really isn't a cutting module this really is an engraving module so once again I'm going to run a material test on here see what we can come up for results on this and uh we'll take a look at them when we're [Music] done right so we ran this test and uh this was pretty much a failure it just kind of made the stuff raise up kind of bubbled it up a bit and didn't really engrave it kind of has me wondering if this isn't really true acrylic but maybe polycarbonate or something different so I have a sheet of acrylic here that I know has worked well with some other lasers so we're going to run this again see if we get anywhere check the results when we're [Music] done [Music] all right so this sheet which I know works a lot better that came out beautifully so we have a nice gradient there and uh getting nice and close there hopefully without any glare for you to see it but it's uh what we're looking for is those really nice brilliant white marks and there's kind of this this band that goes through the middle there again here they're kind of faded here they're overdone but all the way from 40% at 1,000 mm a minute on up to 80% at 3,000 maybe 90% you can see that it's looking pretty good but if you get in really close and I don't know that it's going to come through on the video but our line interval is still probably too high and get that to focus just right it's a little hard on these glaring reflective objects but probably need to tighten up our line interval even more so we'll need to play with that a little bit but uh now that we know this works fairly well on a few different materials I'm going to get some more real world kind of things do a few projects here and we'll take a look at them at the [Music] end [Music] oh [Music] all right so I ran through a number of projects to test it out on some items that you might use this for and I might use this for in the future so thought I'd start and show them for you here so first off have these little brass tags here and if you can see that uh just an example of something you might engrave for like a pet tag so this has you know your animals name so Snoopy and then a phone number on there uh definitely could put some things on there it ran this one at 500 mm a minute 50% power and I bumped the lines per inch up to 450 so it it came fairly solid at that point uh not getting a lot of extra lines in there and it only took 3 minutes and 25 seconds to do this as well so uh this coin is about an inch and a quarter I think so that's about an inch wide about a third of an inch tall to give you an idea how uh big that engraving is so this next one is a challenge coin blank I have a few of these I've played around with some of the fiber lasers and wanted to run it on here so went ahead and did a burn of my logo on this side and this is a vector image on here uh ran this at 750 mm a minute 75% power again with the 400 LPI this took 11 minutes 47 seconds did have a little bit of difficulty making sure that my alignment was correct I was running an absolute coordinates so on the next one I switched it to uh current position and then just put my origin at the center of it and then of course to run my good friend David over the clock Shack ran his logo on there and that got fairly well centered in there uh and this one was actually just a raster image and ran it in the Stucky mode with the same settings of 400 LPI 750 mm a minute 75% power and this ran actually in 6 minutes 47 seconds so a lot less time it is just a touch smaller on that side cuz obviously I can't have his logo bigger than mine but uh as he likes to say now we have coins to flip to see whoever's right all so this logo is about an inch wide and 1/4 in tall there it's got pretty decent contrast to ran this again at 400 LPI but this time at 1,000 mm a minute and 80% power only took a minute 45 seconds to do this so definitely something you could do with the IR module you could uh definitely engrave your own tools or maybe it's you know you're wanting to work with a business and personalize them maybe tag them with their logo or just uh you know their name so they don't necessar walk off and such uh but something you can do and it doesn't really take a long time so of course we played around with the acrylic settings and this one can interact with plastics and so uh I have this uh earbud case that it's kind of more of a matte finish it's not a polished and it's dark so I wasn't really sure how well this is going to come out but on the back side I did go ahead and work to engrave my logo and if I can get that to focus you see it's it's okay um I think the plastic itself it has this coating on on the top that instead of Engraving it was kind of melting a little bit uh so it didn't come out as crisp but I don't blame the laser for that because I've seen some high detail in other spots but it still got the point across uh I ran this at 3,000 mm a minute 70% power 400 LPI and took just basically a minute and that that's maybe about a third of an inch not quite a half an inch tall uh and uh and wide so gives you a quick idea on that as well now really wanting to highlight the detail that this laser can get into thought we'd try engraving a slate tile done this a lot on co2 lasers on uh the blue light lasers on the various galvo lasers uh but the nice thing about these IR modules is that their spot size is so much smaller and this longer one even reports to be like I think 003 mm squared and so I ran the DPI not quite that high but ran it up to 43 dots per inch which comes out to be about 06 6 mm and ran this tile now this is a picture that is off of laser.com that's the imager website where they have both free and uh paid images so they're pre-processed I did set the DPI to 423 in approximately size this is about 3 and2 in tall and it uh was ran at 2500 mm a minute 100% power like I said 423 DPI processed on laser pick.com through imagers tools so uh I just used the pass through setting in lightburn and this did take a while this did take about 38 minutes to finish but the detail is just incredibly impressive on this uh it would be really great to stand one of these flat and uh hit it with some uh satin finish polyacrylic and such and then get even a higher contrast then blow this picture up just big enough so it barely or just just fits within the boundaries and I think you'd see even better detail from that but really impressed with the detail of this laser granted it's at a sacrifice of speed but if you want this quality and that high resolution it is going to take some time so that is going to wrap up this video wanted to do a number of tests on a few different materials try to give you a pretty good idea of what this IR module work this does fit on both the longer Ray 5 as well as the longer B1 frames as far as I understand their website and it has a pretty decent price point right now during the holidays if you can snag it you'll get a pretty good deal but even in the normal price for adding the ability to mark on metal without jumping into a whole another laser it does give you some decent options for you to work with so I will have some links down below for you to check that out if you interested some of them will be affiliate links and they do go to support this channel as always I appreciate you using them if you feel that my influence on this was deserved but as always my goal here is just to give you good information to help you decide on what lasers you might need to get into and if they're going to work for you so once again thank you for being here with this video thank you for being part of my community and uh I hope you can get out into your workshop and make something too we'll catch you next time

Channel: Vintauri

Views: 1,386

Keywords: diode laser, laser, hobby laser, laser enclosure, sculpfun, sculpfun enclosure, xtool, ortur, atomstack, Comgrow, laser safety, laser fire, 10w laser, 5w laser, vintauri, laser tutorial, basic laser engraver, laser cutting, laser engraving, china laser, ebay laser, cheap laser, laser tips, hobby laser enclosure, workshop laser, LED Tealight, Laser files, Diode laser project, Wainlux Laser, Sculpfun S30, custom magnets, Starbond, Geekbuying, Longer 3D, Longer B1, Longer Laser

Id: nC2qVOFbf0A

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 25 2023