Basketball Stencil cut 

with 4 inch focal length laser

The laser power is still good but I did need to increase the percentage by 5-15% compared to the football themed stencil cut earlier this summer. There was a bit more haze on the outer cut edges too, however, by using clever placements of blades and backing tape, the usual stuck on white debris was almost non-existent. Unlike previous design cut jobs, I skipped my usual laser alignment and beam quality check.

For the first time, I avoided use of the exacto blade to cut my 10 inch by 12 inch plexiglass template rectangle. I decided to just make an RDWorks g-code file for that rectangle and let the laser cut it for me instead! While I had the file loaded in memory, I went ahead and cut several more until I exhausted my available space on the sheet purchased from Lowe's. This is a big time saver and avoids tedious manual labor.

It took 38 seconds to cut the rectangle. It took 4 minutes and 5 seconds to cut the full basketball design into the rectangle.

I suffered through a bit of confusion regarding how the on-board system differentiates the origin from the framing outline. Normally I set my design origin to be the upper right corner. I was working on a different computer that had the default changed to the design origin being dead center (the prior user likely was using a circularly symmetric design). Therefore, when I tried to use the on-board framing button on the laser, I got a "X Slop Over" error, which means that you are asking the laser head to position itself outside the bed boundaries. All I had to do was go back to RDWorks, reset the design origin to upper right, resave the Ufile and then all worked as normal with the on-board origin and the framing start point as one and the same. See my Blogsite section titled RDWorks for more details on this issue.

As a courtesy I am now deleting my uploaded g-code files from system memory after I finish the cut job. The on-board memory can only hold 99 files.

8.8 inches by 6.2 inches for the largest ellipse.

Usable stencil components

Cut out pieces

Smooth clean small cuts can be achieved with proper laser settings

I purposely tried a cut line close to tangential to the circle to see how tight the cut line would be. The circle held its own.

All the components in concentric positions and backing tape removed.