I've seen a few post with people asking about inexpensive Chinese fiber lasers. We got one about a year ago and are happy with it. I don't sell this equipment nor am I an expert, my interest was basically to avoid having to run large expensive spindles at high rpm. I found this useful so here's MHO...
What you see here is a 50W fiber laser (galvo-uses internal moving mirrors to move the beam around) with a 110mm lens which is swappable with other wider field lenses. Larger lenses will reduce overall power especially at the edges while increasing the lasing area. Similar to an EDM burn, material hardness doesn't slow the process, reflectivity of the surface does. Its faster to label hard tool steel then shinny 6061. We can adjust all kinds of settings to leave a white, black or gray surface (some laser sources are much better and worse doing this). The unit operates with terrible, buggy spyware, EzCAD2, on mostly any windows computer which connects by USB port, we have the computer segregated with no internet or network connection. It's not hard to put much fancier pictures or text into the software, using vector files. Inkscape or Photoshop will do anything you could imagine, then move the art into the ezcad2 for burning. We have a rotary which works fine to put a flat image into a curved surface.
The pictures are with no cleanup or consideration for aesthetics, just quick labels, the heavier ablated material lands wherever and welds/sticks itself to the plate, easy to remove with a stone or file. We have an OK 2" suction line removing the burnt junk and nasty air, a higher volume system would remove more stuff and leave the product cleaner. 1st pic is typical of how we use it, to permanently label tools & fixtures. The lettering depth is about .005+" and took 3m16sec. 2nd pic same depth, bigger letters 26 seconds. 3rd- a little bluing for contrast. This is on 6061-t651 material. The deeper you want to go the longer it takes, .002"-.005 very quick, .007"-.015 is going to need a few minutes.
This system is very manual, you can get the same hardware with better software to sequential label for 4 or 5x the price of one of these. All in about 7k, with a few lenses, some fixturing and accessories. Laser sources can vary in quality so do some investigating to find out who makes the one your getting and if it will do all the things you want.
Happy other kind of burning!!
What you see here is a 50W fiber laser (galvo-uses internal moving mirrors to move the beam around) with a 110mm lens which is swappable with other wider field lenses. Larger lenses will reduce overall power especially at the edges while increasing the lasing area. Similar to an EDM burn, material hardness doesn't slow the process, reflectivity of the surface does. Its faster to label hard tool steel then shinny 6061. We can adjust all kinds of settings to leave a white, black or gray surface (some laser sources are much better and worse doing this). The unit operates with terrible, buggy spyware, EzCAD2, on mostly any windows computer which connects by USB port, we have the computer segregated with no internet or network connection. It's not hard to put much fancier pictures or text into the software, using vector files. Inkscape or Photoshop will do anything you could imagine, then move the art into the ezcad2 for burning. We have a rotary which works fine to put a flat image into a curved surface.
The pictures are with no cleanup or consideration for aesthetics, just quick labels, the heavier ablated material lands wherever and welds/sticks itself to the plate, easy to remove with a stone or file. We have an OK 2" suction line removing the burnt junk and nasty air, a higher volume system would remove more stuff and leave the product cleaner. 1st pic is typical of how we use it, to permanently label tools & fixtures. The lettering depth is about .005+" and took 3m16sec. 2nd pic same depth, bigger letters 26 seconds. 3rd- a little bluing for contrast. This is on 6061-t651 material. The deeper you want to go the longer it takes, .002"-.005 very quick, .007"-.015 is going to need a few minutes.
This system is very manual, you can get the same hardware with better software to sequential label for 4 or 5x the price of one of these. All in about 7k, with a few lenses, some fixturing and accessories. Laser sources can vary in quality so do some investigating to find out who makes the one your getting and if it will do all the things you want.
Happy other kind of burning!!
