Laser Cutter General

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Cutting

WARNING: THESE POWER LEVELS DO NOT APPLY TO HITCHIN HACKSPACE EQUIPMENT

7.5mm acrylic
Setting With film Without film Without film (alternate)
Power (mA) 20mA 18mA 20mA
Speed (mm/s) 2.5 2.8 2.8
Bed height (mm) 61 61 61

Etching

Undocumented. Though many have had great success with surface etched designs especially on wood and acrylic.


Things to make

Box generators

BoxMaker

Link: http://boxmaker.rahulbotics.com/

This script has been tested to created a 50mm cube from 7.5mm clear acrylic, here are the settings used.

Interestingly, the cube had an internal width of 42mm and external width of 57mm - this was due to the DPI, the generator assumes 100 DPI, the Inkscape default is 90 DPI. Once set correctly, it is highly accurate.

Units millimeters
Width 50
Height 50
Depth 50
Material Thickness 6.5
Notch Length Auto
Cut Width (Kerf) 0.1

Boxer

This is a Perl script...

Link: https://bitbucket.org/hudson/boxer/overview

This is untested. May work well with wood but will not play nicely with the 7.5mm acrylic. burn baby burn the fun part

Project inspiration...


Help / issues

Materials/Cutting

It's been found that if you try cutting with Acrylic underside's protective film removed, you will find 'swirl marks' after cutting. These are caused by the heat/smoke being extracted from the cut. To fix this, simply leave the protective film in place until you are finished cutting.

Software

LaserCut 5.3

NOTE: The demo software will crash in the demo on A0 "Silvertail" settings. Please change the file "syscfg - Blacknose.ini", find "NeedRevise=1" under section "[TWOAXIS_0]" and change it to "NeedRevise=0" - a revised download may be provided soon. Source - Nottingham Hackspace wiki

Material sources...