monkeysarefun

I don't know how big a one pound coin is but looking at that, I'd say jam jar lid size? You guys have big pockets. Quite a few posts here over the last couple of days! Jason - The wobbly horizontal lines obviously imply an issue - if you do have dodgy brackets that could be it, otherwise I'd be checking the belt tension on one or other of the belts, because all lines should be perfectly straight. If you are still having the problem after you fit the new brackets then send a pic of the test plot to darklylabs, from posts on their forum they seem able to look at this and diagnose most issues going by which part of the plot looks wrong. I've bought some taskboard but so far have only used it to scribe a brickwall onto (into?). Ill post it up when I get it painted, hopefully this weekend. Quick impressions of the stuff itself, its recycled so it has a fairly rough fibrousy recycled finish to it, which is great for brickwalls, not sure about carriage sides. Also it separates into layers quite easily, again good for weathered brick walls (ie some bricks can be lifted off to imply damage), but not sure about representations of other surfaces. The only none laser cutting I've done on it (ie with a stanley knife) is to cut a piece off of the original 20 inch sheet to use in the laser cutter. I found the knife blade did catch quite easily, causing tufting and tearing of the cut, although it was just a rough hacking cut to be fair, done pretty fast and with not too much care about the end result. I'm not sure how it would go in a cutting machine, given the high-angle of the blade. I base the above on the 1/16th taskboard, I also have the 1/32 which I haven't tried yet, but being thinner that might cut more cleanly. Also it is meant to be sandable so that might get rid of the slightly rough finish, I haven't tried that yet. So based on one little fairly thick bit that I've done one knife cut on and lasered a patch of brickwork on, so far I'm happy with its abilities to reproduce a brick wall, but beyond that I can't really comment. Oh, I also haven't yet tried spraying a bit with water and seeing if it sets in intricate curves, but I'll try that with an offcut , again hopefully this weekend. Final count down to the 'big announcement". The timing is based on midnight, our time. Why do techy companies love midnight releases - what have they invented - "Call Of Duty: Lasers?" (although that would be quite cool...)

Following on from Michaels comments there,not sure if its an issue with you but be aware that the Emblaser does A3 maximum, whereas the Silver Bullet and the other cutters have a wider cutting area and they have a feed system so maximum length is much greater too.

Gday Milkbar1, I'n still on a learning curve with using the Emblaser and getting the settings correct, hence some of the excessive scorching at times! Regarding your particular request, have you checked out the DarklyLabs community forum and in particular the Project showcase there, as well as in the archived area. ? I know for sure that there are users there who are sucessfully doing what you are asking and they usually have accounts of materials used and settings required. As for your query about scanning the designs, you would need to import the scan into a graphics package such as Inkscape or the Cut2Dlaser that comes with the Emblaser, and either trace it to create the cutting line or by using the trace bitmap option which automatically traces the line for you, though this requires a fairly high contrast (eg black design on white background) to work successfully, but if you do have black and white the tracing is usually very accurate - , thats how I did all the ironwork examples posted yesterday. Hopefully this helps out, if nor feel free to ask more questions, either here or at the darklylabs site - they are very supportive.

Nice! It looks much more complex.

Thanks for confirming the colour thing - it was quite a revelation discovering that today! Re your brackets and the cool 3D kind of effect - I guess there are layers there?

Hi Dave, Just hold off for 4 days or so going by the darklylabs homepage! Speed of the cutter IS one factor that causes burn, but it is a real juggling act to get the right mix of speed, power, number of passes and so on to prevent it. Speeding up the laser can introduce other issues - purely from watching it do its stuff the laser isn't a steady light source, it seems to pulse - actually,rapid flicker would be more accurate. So by going faster you can tend to get perforations rather than a clean cut line. I've yet to come up with a fool proof algorithm that takes in power, material, speed, complexity of detail and number of passes that will prevent burning. However, todays experiments with the black card are the first time I've had zero burn holes when doing really tiny shapes, so I'm going to stick using that I reckon! Thanks for the comments.

And just one more - because this is more fun than cutting the grass, which is what I'm meant to be doing..

Actually, seeing Giles awesome black bracket made me wonder if there might be a 5th variable (apart from material, power, speed and number of passes) - the colour of the material. The eternal optimist from work who hopes I'm going to do his wedding invites had given me some various sample stock to try. One was a black cardboard, about 0.35mm thick. I tried the same bracket that I'd been playing around with using white paper and photo paper, and there is definitely an improvement in the result. I was able to lower the power and up the speed and every little element was cut through cleanly without needing to poke them out with tweezers: Emboldened ( or should that be Emblasened?) I went hunting for more little things to cut out. Here is a little wrought iron kind of panel, it had no trouble coping with the fine details here: So I went finer still - a wrought iron door. Some of the very fine twirly bits didn't make it through but on a whole the detail is pretty good: Then I got a bit cocky, the detail here is about a hairsbreadth and it was at this point that bits started breaking off: But still, I don't know of any other way - apart from maybe having your own personal Allan Downes with Stanley knife attachment - to get fine details like this: Settings were 80% power and a single pass at 18mm/sec. I can't be sure whether its the quality of the card that makes it work so well , or whether black does absorb the laser or whatever, but I'll be using this black card from now on, and I won't be buying any more scalelink brackets, gates or railings!

The focusing thing is a pain to do and I couldn't rely on just the size of the light dot on the testpiece to get the focus accurate, because turning the lens made it go from faint dash to blurry dot, and stayed at blurry dot until I turned it too far and the lens dropped out. I ended up using the technique described in post #4 of this thread. If you have a magnifying glass to compare the line widths it is a big help,. Domenics rule of thumb is that you should be able to cut plain white copy paper at 1800mm/min (note - mm/min, not second!) My unit is a little lower at the front but I haven't found it to be an issue, I was concerned that it might affect the accuracy by not being able to precisely set the focal distance with the tool but in reality I've been doing a lot of 3mm ply which bows up or down slightly so the focal length differs all over the job and that doesn't seem to be a problem. Amazing brackets Giles! ( can I just mention that you missed a bit - like I always do too! .)...

The teaser picture in the newsletter seems to be implying a complete redesign...

I knooooow........ I got the newsletter last night. Might have to do some more overtime!

Sunsets are particularly spectacular when laser-cutting in the evenings!

I couldn't get the honeycomb aluminium here, unlss I wanted enough to build a casino development and attached airport with, so I used chipboard and bought a cheap A3-ish sized photoframe and fixed the glass out of this to the top of the chipboard with a square of double sided tape at each corner to separate the work-piece from the wood. It seems to work ok, though you still get the pattern etched through the glass and into the chipboard below. It also has the added advantage of being able to be wiped down - I've been doing a fair bit of ply while wearing my ship-modellier hat - and there is a sticky kind of residue built up, I guess from the resin or adhesive in the ply being melted.

For thicker card (1mm and over) I've been tending to leave the power at 100 and just fiddle with the speed. For 1mm card I've found 8mm/sec seems to cut through, and 6mm/sec for 1.5mm card. Both done in a single pass.If you can't cut through the 1.5mm card at these settings it might be worthwhile looking at the focus again - I fiddled with mine for around 2 hours until I got a line about a hairsbreadth, it was worth the effort, tedious is at was to continually remove the shield, quarter-turn the lens, replace shield, draw line, compare with previous line etc etc etc... But - it only needs to be done once!, Reducing the number of passes will reduce the scorching on the rear - here is a test piece of the taskboard that I'm just starting to play with. This is the reverse of a couple of tests I did at different speeds. The one to the left is 7mm/sec, the one to the right is 10mm/sec and the middle one which cut clean was 6mm. Once I've found that out, I write it down somewhere.. I replaced the gantry brackets this morning, and interestingly now I have NO free play in the rods, even though checking with a depth gauge showed no difference in depth of the rod holes in the old brackets vs the new.

Note that it is the ANZAC day weekend here so you might not get a response until Tuesday our time. I'll be replacing the two brackets on mine today with the new ones so I'll pay more attention doing it and let you know how it ends up. This is what Domenic sent me re slowing down the laser travel times: Apologies for this part breaking. I will organise to have replacement sent to you asap. We have made a small tweak to the Emblaser parameters recently which could help prevent this issue you have experienced. What is actually happening is that the motors are losing steps during very fast moves because of anything from the issue you have found to some tightness in the bearings. A simple way to eliminate this is to make a small change to some Emblaser parameters. It will require you to run Universal GCode Sender to enter the new values. This is not complicated to run and explained in our User Manual. When you have it running and are connected to the Emblaser, enter the following commands into the command prompt: $110=6000 $111=6000 $120=750 $121=750 This slightly reduces and smooths out rapid-moves. It does not affect and speed while your machine is engraving or cutting. And again at the risk of being repetitive, ensure those dip switches are all set to 'on' (ie all 'UP') because it makes a big difference to the cutting power of the laser!

From memory when building mine, the rods were a bit of an effort to push into the left and right carriage mountings, there was a little bit of resistance - but once in they do have a little bit of free play, in that you can slide them about 5mm each way inside the mountings - so it may be worthwhile rechecking this bit. Hmm, but then again maybe you got it right and I just pushed too hard! Also, if you have the 4watt unit I assume you set the dip switches on the PCB to all on because by default they are set for the 3W unit ( I didn't do this so I'm making sure everyone else does!) I have been up in Queensland with work so haven't had a chance to use the emblaser lately but before I went I did have a bit of an issue where on starting a job the laser would occasionally get halfway to the origin point but then a groaning noise would happen and the laser would commence the job there, as though something had jammed it in its travel. On inspection I found that the strap that holds one of the bearings on the righthand carriage unit had become detached - I got in touch with the support desk by email and when I got back from the 1950's - oops, I mean Queensland - there was a package with both left and righthand brackets, and a little tool for focussing the laser, and an email from Domenic with some revised settings to put into the emblaser to smooth out its traveling to and from the work piece. . After sales support is first class.

And you can read about it - and Huntsman Spiders - here!

That bottom picture, that is so easy to mistake for a real building.. and the top picture - that is so easy to mistake for a real thumb Talking materials - my 40 sheets of taskboard arrived yesterday so hopefully I can try that out on the weekend and report back. This also looks interesting, and these guys ship to down here, so I've ordered some.

i clicked the 'agree' button, to mean that I'll have to lift my game too, I'm not intending to imply in anyway that I agree that you need to lift yours!

Hi Kev, The base of a straight out the box emblaser is 2mm aluminium sheet, and there are little rubber feet that raise it half an inch or so above the surface, so magnets are an option, you'd just need to be aware of the path that the laser head takes to get to the work to avoid it crashing into the magnets, since it has a shield which is only .5mm above the workpiece - but it could be done. I found the aluminium sheet a little flimsy and prone to not being flat across its entire area, so added some 10mm MDF topped with a piece of 3mm glass stuck on with double sided tape. All up,with the work piece added it might be a bit thick for the power of magnets, but.... I'm thinking now as I write this, how about some strips of thin steel or something that is more magnetic sandwiched between the MDF and the glass, and then magnets on top to hold the work down? Thats definitely something to think about, since currently I'm using masking tape which doesn't stick too well to the glass here when its humid, so thanks heaps Kev - I'll follow that up and report back! Come join us..... you know you want to!

Giles, You're the emblaser king! You should submit that pic to the projects part of the darklylabs forum - thats awesome. I've been waylaid by someone at work hearing I have a laser cutter trying to talk me into doing his daughters laser cut wedding invitations because 'why pay 15 bucks a card when a bloke at work will do it for nothing?" (he thinks..)

You"re not following my thread on the "evil overlords of darkness" site then...?

I'd give 5 thumbs up if there was a icon that did that!

Ply can be weird. I had a piece that had a 1cm wide inviisible strip through the middle of it that would not laser. Everything I tried to cut out that ventured into this strip just didn't work. There was nothing obvious that caused this, even checking the area with a jewellers loupe showed nothing up. I am collecting all these bits and will be making armour out of them for when the aliens attack.

How could a bloke called Ray NOT know heaps about lasers! Hey Simon, As Ray said, your laser cutter has different capabilities from the emblaser, being a CO2 unit and all. Have you seen this blokes blog? He has a unit that sounds like it matches your specs, so maybe the info in his blog might be more pertinent to you in regards to settings and so on. Not for one second trying to get rid of you though, OK? Just trying to find someone who can help you with your ply problems. I wish I had your laser - in fact, I have the adoption papers all ready to sign ...... dad! Cheers from Chris