LASER CUTTING 😩👌👌✄

PEW PEW PEW. Many of us would relate lasers with sci-fi movies like star wars where it comes from blasters and have that high pitch 'pew' sound. However in reality, there are no laser blasters yet but laser cutters do exist. This entry is focused on my journey on laser cutting using a CO2 laser cutter and what are the experiences I took away from it.

Before the laser cutting practical began my group had to complete an Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) on how to operate the laser cutter. Our parts on how to start-up, shut down and safety procedures were fine, whereas our SOP on how to use Corel-Draw was not as accurate as the other parts. 

Figure 1: ⇧ Initial SOP  

                                                  

As from the initial SOP, nothing was mentioned about the cutting speed, laser power and laser frequency to cut the material. Thankfully during the practical I learnt about it from the kind lectures and this is the relationship between the type of cut and the laser cutting speed and power.

Vector cuts: As thickness of material increases, cutting speed should decrease while laser power increases. This is to enable the laser to have enough energy to make a clean cut through the material and without a 2nd run needed.

Engraving: For a lighter engraving, cutting speed should increase while paired with a low laser power. This is ensures the laser does not cut through the material but only removes a small layer of material on the top surface where the cut is taking place.

From these here is my new and improved SOP

Operation of Laser Cutting:

1. Start up compressor, fume extractor and laser cutter machine.
2. Launch CorelDraw on the computer.
3. Import DXF file design to CorelDraw.
4. Select the design for vector cut in RGB red and hairline, and fill engraved area in RGB green.
5. After preparing areas to be cut or engraved, select the print option to send design to Epilog.
6. On the Epilog dashboard turn on auto-focus and air assist.
7. Import material being used and specify the thickness of the material used for the vector cut.
8. Specify the laser power, speed and frequency for the type of cut performed.
9. Select print to send the file to the laser cutter.
10. Check the file name sent to the laser cutter and estimated time required to cut.
11. Press GO to being cutting
12. Once cutting process has ended, wait for 1 minute before retrieving laser-cut product.

Here are some videos of the laser cutting machine operating.

Using Epilog programme

At the end of the practical we managed to bring homes some items.

Figure 2: 3mm Acrylic test piece from 
laser cutting competency test

Below 2 picture are possible methods to assemble our designed parametric construction kit :)

Figure 3: Final laser cut product???

Figure 4: Endless fun and creativity
                with our construction kit!

Reflection

Some things that we could have improved on in this practical. One is the design of the individual pieces as the slots for for some of the pieces were either too short or too long which wasted time an material during 3 hour practical. I feel before any design practical I should do on some research on common mistakes or important points to take note. Another is importing a DXF file into CorelDraw, this made it difficult to adjust our design however we resolved this problem by creating a  DXF file for each component needed and this went smoothly from there.
This practical was something I really enjoyed as we could make our own designs and cut them out to precise measurements using a Laser! I liked how we can use FabLab during our own time to complete our own projects and use this advance machinery. I will definitely use the FabLab for future projects.
Here is the fusion360 design