this is how to find my laser settings what's up i'm jonathan and welcome to
maker tales where i'm sharing my make a journey to help you go further in yours
so don't forget to subscribe and hit that little bell icon to never miss an
opportunity to keep making this video is all about sharing
my workflow to find my perfect laser settings be it whatever material
this is usually the steps that i take for every single material that comes in
for this video i got a hold of some jute burlap wrap which i wanted to basically
just see how nicely i could go ahead and get an engraving on it
or a kiss cutting score line on it and also seeing how quickly i could cut it
as well i've never worked with this material
before so let's go into the workflow of how i found the laser settings for this
firstly it comes to safety i make sure the material is safe to laser cut
and that's purely done by research online and if at any point
i hear anything of any chemical especially chlorine
or if it's really high in formaldehyde i usually go ahead and step back from that
material but if you're aware that there's nothing
bad with it then i go on to the next step to start
off with i preferably like to start with engraving first as
it's usually the lowest power you're going to be using
while working with a certain material and you get to find out where the
burning points of a material is so for something like this burlap it's
going to be quite low so first of all i go ahead and i create
this file here so what i like to do here is give myself
a nice big block here to get my laser up to
full speed and then i've got all these other
smaller ones over on this side here that this is to
represent text so i get an idea and what i do is
go point five one millimeter 1.5 millimeter
all the way up to three millimeters here at the end
to see the type of engravings that i get at all
the different power settings now for the initial engraving
you have to really do a bit of a stab in the dark but
my rule of thumb is to start low and then go up
so using a bit of power deduction a bit of online research if you don't know
what settings to go with here i felt comfortable starting with a speed
of 1000 on my glowforge and then going for a power setting
of about five percent considering that when i'm doing wood i'm at about 50
percent for quite a deep engraving and when i'm kiss cutting i'm only at 10
power but i'm at one-fifth of the speed so i thought
that would be a good starting point so this here was my first result from
there i decided that i also wanted to do two other results
and the way that i do this is i step it up only
using one setting higher so i already have my dpi set
because i knew that i wanted to get relatively good resolution
so i had 256 dpi and then i put up my power
up by five i did two other tests so i had one at 10 power and one in 15
power and what i found is then later on when
actually touched my final other two
tests down here they just fell apart so obviously there's a burlap wrap
it's going to be quite heat susceptible and made sure that then if i'm going to
be doing any engraving it's going to be up here but i've got to make sure that
it's thick enough because i can see over here that even on my one millimeter
i can hardly see how that's coming out so
i decided that from this point that i needed to explore
my score lines because that's my next power rating up
because i'm going to be going at a slower speed thus the same amount of
power that i might be using up here it's going to be
a lot more intense so having done the research of the above
i know that if i go at about 15 power i'm getting
close to a cut so i don't want to go too much higher above that so then down
here i create a new file which again i have a nice
long line so that my laser can get up to speed and we get a true
representation this is very important for those lasers
that aren't like low force that are automatically
calibrated if you don't have a glow forge what you
have to do is you've got the correction value which is the power
ramping to your speed ramp that you are going to have to play around with
and what you'll have there is it'll either over cut or undercut
the score at each end and what you basically have to play around is finding
the perfect tuning so that you get a clean line and that's
why we have this part over here of all these other
little lines so what we have is a one millimeter two
millimeter three millimeter four millimeter all the way up to
a five or six millimeter over there so we just get an idea
of with the ramping do we have the correct settings
it sometimes comes that when you're working with very susceptible materials
and you're wanting a very precise line you're going to have to even create two
settings one for longer lines and one for shorter
lines depending on the size of the project
that you're working with so after coming out with these results here
i was starting to get really happy and i decided what i was
going to do is for my other tests down here that i would
actually go ahead and play around with defocusing
because i realized that up here i straight away hit
the nail on the head because of my tests above
and i knew where the heat limit was for my jute fibers here so what i went
ahead and did is realizing that i'm going to have a
really hard time with the fibers that i went and unfocused my laser to
create thicker lines i did an entire video on
unfocusing you can go check that out it's in the card and
down in the description so then what i did is i did an unfocusing of
only three millimeters so i have a hairline which is my normal
kiss cut line then i've got my three millimeter offline
which is basically a finish line and then i wanted a really thick line
so here down here i just went the highest possible that my glowforge does
which if i set that to 10 it's going up to
around about 10 millimeter offset from the base because it can take
a good six millimeters of material and this is hardly even a millimeter
anyway lastly from there using that exact
same file we go ahead and we go into the cuts
now the cut was very much you have your information from the above
so using our kiss cut so we know that point
where we don't want to go over we're also using the information from our
engraving so the type of power that it becomes
brittle or it becomes too deep of an engraving
if you're working with wood we go to the cut lines now the cut lines
through the power deduction i basically did it the same
as my kiss cut or scoring lines which i like to be at about 200 speed
because that means if i get a really complicated design
the power seems to stay rather consistent for me
if you have your speed too high you might have quite
inconsistent power depending on the laser that you're using
so when it came to the cut i knew that i needed to go above 15 because
15 power gave me this burnout here so i go and set that top one to 20
now knowing the way that laser cutting works and especially when it comes to
materials we have these smaller lines that worked
out pretty well but i realize when you're working with
natural materials they're going to be inconsistencies
so what i would say especially with cut settings
go about 10% up or if you don't mind marking the back of your material go a
little bit higher still because you never know
i might have a really thick jute fiber somewhere in here
that i wouldn't want to ruin a piece with so having done that
i then did one more test down here going all the way up to 30
and the main thing that i saw here was on the back i had some marking that i
wasn't really happy with but at the same time
i knew that i was cutting through the material very cleanly
having found my settings you now need to go and put them to the test
what i like to do is something a bit like this badge here
so what i have is an engraving test then i have my
thin line test my fit line test and my cut line test this is all the
settings that i would need for a future project
so let's show you the file that i use which is this one here
really easy to set up and then from there we go ahead and cut it out
taking that out of the laser we now know that we have the perfect laser settings
that we're happy with that we can see the engraving see our
hairline see our thick line and see our cut line
and from there we know that we can go ahead and do a project
so for me one of the main projects that i wanted to do was engraving on this
burlap so i straight away went ahead and did an
engraving and that there is the lovely result from it now there is
one thing this took an age to do in fact it took
me an hour to do this one engraving of course
i'm using a glow forge which isn't exactly the fastest for engraving
so i realized that i had to put in a bit of time to create some line art from the
same artwork and this here is that line art right
there so after about four hours of doing some line art that
there is the outcome and this only took 12 minutes to
make so you can see that side by side we've got
one hour and 12 minutes so of course that not being big enough
for me i went and did it the entire size of the glowforge which comes out
with this beautiful piece right here
and for those of you wondering where i got this artwork from
well this is from the biodiversity heritage
library they've gone ahead and uploaded 150 000
field sketch illustrations on their flickr page
to open public domain they're doing this to encourage people
to understand what a field sketch is as well as just bringing out
the news that there's all this incredible our
artwork out there and they just want to bring it out to the public
because it's in public domain you can go ahead over there
get as much inspiration from them even create
line artwork from the sketches themselves so the link is down in the
description to that flickr page some last closing tips when
it comes to laser settings this is how i've found laser settings
best work for myself this is after a lot of testing with all types of testing
ways to find settings now you might find that you
like to find your cut settings first and then your engraving i feel that
going from a lower power to a higher power
is not only safer but usually gives me more information
when i'm going into finding settings for new materials
when it comes to materials keep in mind that when you're working with things
that are very inconsistent for instance leather maybe a 10 percent
isn't enough to go above when you're doing a cut
but you might even have to go 50 or 30 percent
higher up due to the variation in thickness
this is the same for wood as well especially if you're doing
plywood because there can be occlusions within the plywood
or even knots which can really ruin your day
if you're getting stopped by a knot every now and then
so make sure that you give yourself enough power to cut through these pesky
knots but at the same time that you don't get
too much flash back from the bottom to give you a lot
of secondary work when you're sanding and cleaning off your projects
and on a quick side note if you're interested in getting this line art
right here the link is down in the description
where you can go ahead and get it for the price of a premium coffee
because it took me definitely more than a couple of coffees to make that
anyway guys a huge thank you to my patrons you guys are
absolutely awesome it means the world to me if you think i'm worthy of your
support i'd love to see you there too don't forget that we have a discord
channel the link is down in the description as well
and join the maker conversation there thanks for watching
keep making and let the quest continue