Power meter jumps all over the place, laser not cutting

Post Reply
lauckstreet
Posts: 66
Joined: Wed Apr 16, 2014 3:40 am
Contact:

Power meter jumps all over the place, laser not cutting

Post by lauckstreet »

Two days ago I spent hours aligning the mirrors on my 80 watt laser. It was cutting great, 40% power, 10mm per second, and cut through a 1/4" piece of hard boxwood like a hot knife through butter.

Today I tried repeatedly to cut a piece of 1/4" basswood, which is much softer than the boxwood I cut the other day. At 40% power, it barely etched the wood. I went through the alignment process again and found the x axis mirror slightly out of alignment even though I locked it down. I tweaked it and it was hitting dead center of the mirror. I tweaked the lens holder as well using my red dot laser as I had done before.

I tried to cut out a rectangle again at 40% power, then 50%, then 60%, then 70%, and finally at 80% power I gave up.

I watched the power meter as the laser was cutting and it jumped all over the place from 9ma to 14ma and never going over 14ma even when I was up to 80% power. The cut was about 3/16" into the wood which was 1/4" deep.

I'm at a loss as to what to do next. I've checked all my wire connections, rechecked the alignment of each mirror using cardstock targets I printed, everything looks great.

I could sure use some help.

Thanks,

Bob
Tech_Marco
Posts: 4654
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:00 pm
Contact:

Re: Power meter jumps all over the place, laser not cutting

Post by Tech_Marco »

Check whether is "PPI" is enabled or not.
Check the beam before it enter the beam combiner see if it is go beyond the hole

Do the test on 1/4" hard wood that you had no trouble to cut couple days see if same result happened


Marco
lauckstreet
Posts: 66
Joined: Wed Apr 16, 2014 3:40 am
Contact:

Re: Power meter jumps all over the place, laser not cutting

Post by lauckstreet »

Tech_Marco wrote:Check whether is "PPI" is enabled or not.
Check the beam before it enter the beam combiner see if it is go beyond the hole

Do the test on 1/4" hard wood that you had no trouble to cut couple days see if same result happened


Marco
PPI was turned on. I turned it off and it ran as expected, a steady 22ma at 55% power but I still have alignment problems. It cut at the left hand side but as the head moved to the right, the cut got thinner and thinner until it wasn't cutting at all, but as the head came back over to the left it began cutting again, a little at first and more and more as it got closer to the left. Clearly the mirrors still aren't aligned. So back to the drawing board on the alignment process.

Thanks for the quick reply Marco, and for the answer to the problem.

Bob
Post Reply

Return to “CO2 Laser Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests