It's Easter Break, and we at Solarbotics are shuttin' down for the weekend as of Thursday. See you Monday Morning!
We laser lots of wood and acrylic... like seriously, it's hundreds if not thousands of sheets per year. This volume of throughput tends to cause the lasers to build up a lot of gunk and debris that needs to be cleaned on a regular basis. Besides being safer, it reduces the "flash" marks which are little black marks on the bottom of the material where the laser has burned through the material and reflected off the support table back to the underside of what was being cut.
Selecting the best surface used to support your lasered material comes down to a few options to which you need to ask:
We've used all four methods at Solarbotics (five, if you include the rotary attachment for engraving ...pop bottles), with the honeycomb being the often used solution, but after our last laser cleanup, we've revisited the slat system.
Our latest designs are larger and better tabbed so they stay together. The slat system is ideal for these jobs, with its better managing of debris build-up, and vastly reduced flashing. Less support material below the cut means there's less to get in the way. For comparison, this is what a traditional honeycomb table looks like after a few months of cutting MDF (ug!). Look at that old and crufty thing... and the honeycomb too.
Now take a look at our new cleaned and re-slatted table! It's almost too clean...
As nice as it is, this bed of slats has no indexable edge for us to register our material against. Finding a common origin point on the bed crucial in production, so we used the laser to create our own registration edge!
Using the laser to laser parts for the laser... for better lasering...
Here are the results:
With this in place, we're ready for even higher quality laser cutting.
It's Easter Break, and we at Solarbotics are shuttin' down for the weekend as of Thursday. See you Monday Morning!
Here's a link to a neat project featuring our GM gear motors in several spots in a humanoid arm mechanism. Very cool! Read More...
We've been having lots of fun with Openbeam, building all kinds of handy contraptions out of it. Today's issue of Hey Look It's New Stuff covers a big chunk of our stock. OpenBeam Extrusion - 1000mm Length $175.00 If you find it annoying to cut the 1m open beam extrusions down to size - you […]
Unlike Sparkfun, who actually manage to find fake Atmel ICs, we just get strange batches. The Atmel ATMega328 is the power behind the Arduino/Freeduino/*duino, and we have to set up a programming system to burn the venerable Arduino Bootloader into these chips. We normally use an AVR STK500 in HVSP (high voltage serial programming) mode, […]
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Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.