Hello people. I’m from Holland. And someone asked me for help. It is about a job that contains engraving an image on a door that is 600mm by 2500mm (Dutch metric system)
And then copy that like almost a 100 times.
So I already have the “normal” mpcnc with a 500mw laser 700mm by 500mm and that thing is just amazing but for this job just too small. So I was thinking the lowrider and a 10w laser should do the job Wright?
But then my question, does any one have experience with a 10w laser on a low rider? And what kind of speeds can I get? Don’t want to spent 15 hours per plate that is going to take 2 months to finish that job.
Or does somebody have an other idea to do this thing on a good but fast way? The lowrider is really something I would like to make it looks amazing. I hope it is good enough for the job.
The lowrider is not as nimble as the MPCNC (more moving mass), so your times would probably be slower. For engraving a high powered laser actually limits your grey scale and it is best to stick with a much lower power. Meaning you will only use 0-5% power instead of 0-80% as an example. Larger diode laser also tend to have larger spot size. If you are just using a laser you can temporarily enlarge your MPCNC and put it back after this project.
Is the engraved design 600mm by 2500mm or is that the size of the door itself? If so, how big is the design? You might find that sizing your MPCNC to fit the design, then affixing it to the portion of the door that needs to be engraved would work for you. You would remove your MPCNC from it’s existing table and mount it to a platform that could then be clamped to the door…
I guess that without spindle motor X carrige of LR may be comparable or even lighter then central part of mpcnc. So if use X as main fast axis for engrave raster picture i think it could be enough fast
I think for such a project, if speed is not limited by the laser itself, I would consider using the ZenXY instead of the MPCNC or the lowrider.
It is super light and you probably don’t need the Z axis if your door is flat enough, so you could have really high speed with the coreXY belt system and high acceleration because of the low mass.
It’s a bit of an out of the box thinking, but I’m pretty sure it would work nicely.
As for laser power, I never tried myself but I heard that powerful lasers are not always the best solution, they are harder to control and tend to be less precise (you could probably add some kind of lens system to get it more focused though).
Another Idea, but I’m not sure if and how this could be done, nor if anyone did it before, would be to trace the outlines of your drawings with a low power, precise laser and fill all the large dark areas with a more powerful, less precise laser. This way you could have both a sharp outlining and a very fast speed on infill areas. It would probably work the same way as a tool change for an endmill, I guess. It would take a bit of try and error to get the same shades but I think it could give some possibilities for fun visual effects too.
