Laser problem

[NedMan (Ned Hill)]

Be careful using 100% power on a machine without a current meter. For the longest life of the tube it’s recommended you keep the tube current at or below 15mA with 18mA being the max. With the digital power controllers 100% can be above 18mA. Before I got rid of my digital power controller 50% yielded 15mA. You might want to check your tube current relative to your digital controller settings either temporality or add in a current meter to your machine.

Replacing the K40's Digital Panel with an Analog one

With trouble cutting, the most common issues are either poor beam alignment or the workpiece not being at the right height. For cutting, the ideal bed height places the focus of the laser 1/2 way into the workpiece.

@keen

Focus setup

You have to adjust the bed of the machine to hold the material you’re cutting or engraving to nearly exactly the focus length of the lens. Here’s why.

Your laser beam emerges from the tube about 5-7mm diameter (¼ inch, more or less), is reflected by three mirrors, and then focused by the lens down to a small spot. In a perfect world, the beam would be perfectly round in shape and “Gaussian” as well as “single mode”. These are not perfect lasers, so the beams are not perfectly round nor “Gaussian” nor “single mode”, so they will not focus to a supremely tiny focus spot.