Laser Cutting and Etching Artwork

Thursday, February 21, 2019

Baseball

With MLB Spring training getting started and the opening day for the 2019 season only about 6 weeks away, I thought that a baseball themed design was in order.

I loaded the baseball theme design into the Boss laser LS2436 with the 4-inch focal length optics.

Here are some Lessons Learned:

To set up my standard 10 in by 12 in rectangular piece of plexiglass it's best to only remove the center eight blades.

I had to rerun the outermost oval (30 mm per second) for 15% power because at that speed my first try at 10% power did not cut all the way through. On the second run, the trick is to either set layers at 1% power, either on-board or in RDworks software, so that fall through layers do not get recut. Something very low say 1% power so the laser won't fire. Then only assign the higher power or the lower speed (or both) to the layer to be recut. In the future I'll avoid this problem and make sure my Concentric Circle test samples all of the head speeds that will actually be in the design run.

Note that we are no longer adjusting the compressor pressure away from the default set by the manager.

I am now deleting my files after I'm done. The on-board memory max's out at 99 files regardless of size.

The photos show that all the cuts are very clean. I report that there are essentially no cracks or divots on the back side, nor were there any burn or char marks (either on the backside tape or on the plexiglass). This is proof that the laser is well-aligned and has a good beam cross section. Additionally, there was very little rubbing alcohol & terry cloth cleaning that I needed to do on the surface of the plexiglass stencil parts; debris was kept to a minimum.