Will a Diode Laser Engrave Anodized Aluminum? | xTool D1

today we're going to try marking anodized aluminum with a diode laser spoiler alert it's pretty freaking amazing welcome back to cloud 42 i'm james a couple of weeks ago i uploaded a video showing a new blue diode laser that i have been playing with we tried directly marking stainless steel and we tried using ceramarc black laser marking spray to put some markings on a stainless steel connector panel for the new cnc machine if you haven't seen that video i'll put a link up here you can go check that out and find out more about the laser we're not going to talk very much about that today what i do want to do today is try marking anodized aluminum in theory the laser should be able to blow the dye right out of the anodizing and leave a nice clear mark and it should be able to do it at a pretty high speed certainly a lot faster than we were seeing with the stainless so let's give that a try today let me get some sample pieces let's dial in the settings and once we've got it so that i think we're going to be successful i'd really like to put a nice big logo on the front of my cnc mill spindle and yeah i know you you can see it back there that's what we're going to do today this is the x tool d1 laser that i showed previously this is a 10 watt optical output 455 nanometer blue laser and full disclosure this laser was provided to me by make block in exchange for making a video which i already did so this one's on me we're revisiting this because i'm having fun with it now you can see a few things that are different about the way i have this set up today one is i've got these extension legs on it and these are available from make block you can buy them or they may come with the kit depending on which laser you get and they're just little segments a couple of inches tall each and i've got two segments screwed in under each of the corners to raise the laser up because i'm going to be lasering an object that is relatively large and i need the z height in order to do that for my initial test though i'm just working on some flat pieces i didn't want to reconfigure the laser in the middle of all of this so i've got a couple of 246 blocks here and i'll just put my parts on top of this and then when we get to engraving something larger i'll pull this out of the way and set the parts in here the other difference on this laser from what you saw last time is i have the air assist attached this is just a little air compressor and a line that brings the air up and injects it so that it blows out of the nozzle around the laser beam and this is important if you're going to be cutting or if you have anything that might potentially flame up helps you get to get a cleaner cut and to blow debris out of the cut and to keep the smoke from building up on the surface in this case we're going to be marking anodized aluminum and it does raise some kind of yellow particulate matter sometimes and the air assist probably isn't really needed for this but it will kind of blow that away and get a little bit cleaner engraving at least that's what i've found so we'll go ahead and run it now to start out marking anodized aluminum i want to start with some test pieces i don't want to engrave something valuable on the first try in case it doesn't work out so i need some little test parts and one of the things that make blocks sent with the laser is this material box that has samples of a bunch of different materials wood there's a self-inking stamp there's some rubber and some leather and one of the things they include is a little pack of these anodized aluminum business cards so these are just little sheets of anodized aluminum in a handful of different colors and these make great little test coupons so we'll start with some of these and as far as settings they also included a little pamphlet here with all of the sample materials and here are the metal business cards for the d1 the d1 laser 10 watts they 100 power 105 millimeters per second one pass so we will try that as our starting setting and adjust from there do you need a material kit like this absolutely not but they sent it so we'll use some of the materials as test pieces well let's start by engraving one of these business cards we'll use black because black obviously now because i'm going to have the air assist on and blowing on this and this is a lightweight piece of aluminum i am going to use a couple of pieces of tape and we will tape it down just to make sure that it doesn't go anywhere during the engraving process and i'm just going to throw a couple little pieces of blue masking tape here on the corners and then i need to make sure i have this straight and so i'm just going to do this by eye kind of moving this left and right and looking at the alignment and i'll just adjust it until it looks right to me that looks pretty good let me turn on the air assist and let's get this thing going and of course during this entire process i am wearing my laser safety goggles i've got my artwork here in light burn and if we go in and look at it i am set indeed to 105 millimeters per second 100 percent power and then the line after is also 100 power speed at 100 millimeters per second just slightly lower so we should be ready to go there i have my origin point set up on the center let's center up on this i will use a scale here to try to get it as close as i can that looks pretty good frame that up see what that looks like that's not even close what is going on here my 17 zero okay that's fine not sure what was going on there the center wasn't quite right let me just put it over here and we'll just frame it up from the corner then now i honestly don't know why centering from the center didn't work but we've got it framed up where we want it now let's go ahead and let it run oh oh okay now before i move it at all i'm just gonna wipe it here oh yeah yeah we're good okay let me shut off the laser get it out of the way and turn off the air assist as well and let's see what we have got here i was a little bit concerned because it didn't look very bright and so let me wipe off the residue everything also looks completely yellow because i'm still wearing these that looks amazing look at that okay the one concern that i have is does it only look this good because these are specially treated cards this is you know something very specific that they provided that works really well with this laser what about just other anodized parts let me go find something else in the shop that's anodized and let's try engraving that i rummaged around in my scrap bin and i found this this is a handle of some kind crank it had a handle in this end yes i know it's purple i don't know why it's purple i didn't make it purple but we'll set this up i do know this is anodized aluminum whereas with these business cards i'm actually not sure what this is now i'm a little bit suspicious because this burned out so clean and it looks like nice clean shiny aluminum and i think that generally when you burn through laser etched or laser through anodizing it turns more white so let's see if this reacts any differently so let me just kind of set this up oh and of course my height is wrong so let me bring this out adjust the height fold up the little height adjusting leg and then let's just line this up horizontally before i turn anything on and start making noise that's good enough for a test piece now let's bring this in and get it adjusted pretty close to center that's going to be fine we're just testing and let's frame this [Music] just wants to come down just a touch yeah that's good enough now one of the things i'm going to do is i'm going to come in here and change the power on this because looking closely at this business card i can see that there are some little wavy lines along the bottom from when the laser came whipping around to try to outline it and same thing on this small text going a hundred millimeters per second is just way too fast for that so i'm going to slow that way down maybe 25 millimeters a second and we'll just try that again and see if we still get those artifacts and that's just from trying to accelerate too rapidly so i'll go over here fill plus line and on the line after fill i'm going to set this down to 25 millimeters per second okay got my goggles i'll turn on the air assist and we will let her buck oh yeah and i can already see that is coming out very white not shiny at all oh wow that looks really good that looks much more sane in terms of the speed oh wow look at that and i don't see much at all of the little waviness in the lines there might be a little bit on the text down here which might still be going too fast to manage this small text but that looks really good now one of the things i'm noticing here is that there's no residue on this and so i think i mean this thing had residue that had to be wiped off so i'm really starting to suspect these are not anodized at all these are probably painted i also could smell this when it was running and i really couldn't smell this at all so i strongly suspect that these are painted and this is anodized but look at that brilliant white okay well let's go grab something bigger doing grave and we'll get to what i really had in mind here in a moment now this is what i really want to engrave as soon as i saw the results that i was getting from anodized aluminum on this machine i immediately started looking around the shop to see what else was anodized aluminum and i am pretty sure that is exactly what we've got here on the body of this spindle this is non-magnetic this is magnetic this is non-magnetic it sure looks to me to be aluminum so we are going to try uh marking this with a laser now before i do something big and potentially ugly and you know life-altering on the front of the spindle we're going to flip it over and we're going to engrave on the mounting surface on the back where it's going to be hidden just as a test and make sure that the material is going to react the way we want it to react so let me go ahead and set this up and we'll go ahead and burn a logo here in the back of course you won't be able to see this part when when it's installed so if it goes terribly wrong it'll be fine oh and we also have to adjust the height again okay and i'm also after examining this again under magnification i can see that on this small text there's still some waviness around the edges so i want to just turn the outline off completely and we'll just do the raster scan and just see how that looks [Music] so we'll just change this to only fill let me take a quick look and make sure that's going to do what i think it does yep that looks right and we already framed it up my glasses here and let's let it run now that's not quite as bright as i expected i expected that to come up a lot wider than that i mean it's it's a clear mark it's easy to see and it looks nice but it's not as wide as i wanted let me just run it again right over the top of that and just see if a little more energy will lighten that up more [Music] and that made absolutely no difference whatsoever let me try one other thing let me slow it down a little bit just slow it down maybe 75 millimeters a second i'm going to run it one more time just to see if it makes any difference if it doesn't then we'll just assume that that's what this thing can do [Music] yep and i'm seeing no difference whatsoever so i'm just going to stop it okay so on this particular material the mark isn't super bright but it is very clear very distinct i'm really happy with that let's set up and engrave the front flip this thing over and i want to be really really sure that this is straight on this side that's not going to be tall enough i guess i'm just going to do it by sight again and actually i think that is super close i'm actually sighting down the back side of this across this back edge and looking at the light reflected from the table behind it and just looking for that to be nice and even all the way across and i think we're there now because there's no recess here this is going to have to be adjusted again okay well i think we're ready to go to turn on the air assist go for broke [Music] so okay that is amazing look at that yeah there's just something about this material this is very similar to the i assume this is laser engraving here actually it might not be this feels like it might actually be something on top of the surface or sandblasted or it might be a laser uh a fiber laser or something that marked this but the color is not too dissimilar from that and i love it i love it okay now i need to go get this put back on the machine well i have to say i am really impressed with what this laser will do on anodized aluminum and it's fast and easy and it gets good clean results with very little trouble at all i have in fact spent the rest of the afternoon going around the shop and finding everything i can find that's anodized that i can actually throw under the laser and i've been burning logos into everything and enjoying every minute of it i will definitely be using that process some more i have some questions here that people asked on the last laser video in fact i'm realizing i should probably burn a logo into the back of this too but i'll go through some of these questions and see if i can answer them first question does the sara mark spray work on mild steel and the answer is yes it does here are some pieces that i did on 16 gauge mild steel and it works just as well as it does on the stainless the mild steel isn't as bright so the contrast isn't as great but the ceramic flows out and bonds securely and leaves a really nice mark so yes it works great on mild steel i have not been able to get it to work at all on aluminum i've tried smooth aluminum i've tried brushed aluminum and the laser will not fuse it the laser just blows it completely off the surface and leaves it nice and clean and i've not been able to get it to bond once you rinse it down there's no evidence it was ever even there with the brushed aluminum it will fuse a little bit down in the scratches but it flakes off easily so i've had no luck with aluminum uh maybe maybe there's a way to do it but i couldn't figure it out uh question two what does the ceramic look like up close well here's some shots under a microscope and you can see it's just it's a nice solid black mark and it is fused together securely and it is securely bonded to the metal i'm actually quite impressed it looks just as good under the microscope as it does just with the naked eye i'm really pleased with it question three can you engrave very fine lines yes you can i did not show this in the previous video but here is a test piece where i've burned single laser lines into in fact this is mild steel again and this is you can see they've burned in securely it's nice and solid it's nice and black and the lines are really fine this is a millimeter scale for reference question four couldn't you just use powder coat paint instead of ceramarc to save money i haven't tried it so i don't know but i don't think so i searched the web trying to find other people who have successfully done it and i found absolutely nothing and that's the sort of thing that i think would be all over youtube hacks to do things cheap and i didn't find anything found a bunch of references to burning powder coat off of the metal substrate i even found references to burning off one layer of powder coat to reveal a different colored layer underneath but nothing about actually centering it on my understanding is the powder coat paint is mostly polyester so it's mostly a plastic and it's going to just burn under the laser you need a more gentle heat that heats evenly and in fact heats the metal substrate for several minutes to get the polyester to melt and cross-link and flow out i don't think you're going to get that with the laser but if you manage to get it to work leave me a comment and tell me how you did it because i would be interested in playing with it i would have already tried it but i don't have powder coating gear here in the shop uh question number five isn't dry molly spray lube the same thing as the ceramic yes and no the pigment is the same the ceramic looking through the material safety data sheet appears to have a molybdenum in it as a pigment but the vast majority of the material is silica and other glass components so that it's fusing into a glass or a ceramic and bonding to the metal whereas the dry molybdenum spray does have the molybdenum in it and i have seen examples of people using a laser to bond that to the metal and use it as a marking compound but it's certainly not the same thing it's not going to have the glass component that's the last thing you would have in a lubricant is powdered glass so i don't have any here right now i may pick some up and give it a try but like i said i don't have any in the shop so i haven't tried it so that's all i have for today if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up feel free to subscribe to the channel and leave me a comment i would like to know what you think and if you've got other ideas for things i should try with this laser go ahead and throw those down in the comments too and maybe we'll take a look at it in a future video thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Clough42

Views: 64,174

Keywords: xTool, xTool D1, Makeblock, Laser, Diode Laser, DPSS Laser, Anodized Aluminum, Engraving

Id: k1hj-RbDlLM

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2022