The question has been: If I buy such a 50 Watt cheap laser cutter from China, how many Watts does it really have? I have read all these stories that usually what is advertised is only the theoretical maximum I could get, and will not be realistic at all. This article is about how I tuned the machine and how much I got out of it.

Outline

For a week I have now that laser cutter, and while I had to tweak things, that machine is so far operating nicely. I actually did not really believe in that 50 Watt power, and even at the university we do not have the equipment to measure the real output power. We can measure up to a few Milli-Watts (say the level of laser pointers), but not to the amount of energy such a ’50W’ machine can produce. Instead, I describe how I have tuned the machine so far and what I’m able to get out of it.

Laser Beam Focus

Depending on the lens and the setup, the distance between the cutting head and the target varies, and with the focal point there is a certain cutting length:

The following video very well explains that topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg6THrEdleo&t=231s

I tested the machine with different distances to the engraving target to find the correct beam focus point. Pieces with different sizes helped to set the machine to a given height above the material:

With this I found that the focus point is at 11 mm below the laser nozzle:

Test Sheet

Experimented with different materials, adjusting cutting/engraving speed and laser power.

The outcome is a ‘cheat’ sheet with good values for the materials like plywood or acrylic. Below one of the cheat sheets in Inkscape: Black color gets raster engraved, blue vector engraving and red vector cutting:

Laser Head Oscillations

One small problem I saw is that for vector engraving and cutting, when the laser had has to do an abrupt turn, the head is oscillating, visible if the laser head is moving with 75 mm/sec, when it was coming down and then had to turn 90°:

Reducing the engraving/cutting speed to 25 mm/sec minimizes the effect. In the image below, the laser was coming from the left and had to make a 90° turn. One marker on the scale is 1 mm:

Usable Laser Power

Thinner material did cut well around 40 or 30% laser power.

With thicker materials (4 or 5 mm plywood or similar), I noticed that increasing laser power above 70% did not help much. Instead, slowing down the moving of the laser head helped to get through the material.

So I was wondering how much of the (percentage) laser power is really usable. RDWorks published a nice video how to find this out. So I have used the same approach: cutting a piece of acrylic with different power settings. I have used a 5 mm acrylic with 15mm/sec cutting speed.

From the picture above you can see the ‘V’ style of cut which is noticeable especially for thicker material.

In order not to cut through the material I increased the moving speed to 15 mm. This gave me the following result, with the numbers indicating the laser power percentage (maximum I can set is 99%) set on the machine panel.

In essence, the cutting depth increases in a linear way with increasing the laser power, but only up to around 85%: above that I don’t get more cutting even with increasing the laser power percentage.

I conclude that if the laser tube has a nominal maximum power of 50 Watt, I really get 85% out of it, or around 42.5 Watt. Or as a rule of thumb: I can expect effectively 40 Watt out of a 50 Watt laser tube. Or using the machine above 80% does not make sense and probably only shortens the tube life time.

Summary

Knowing the correct focus point distance is essential to use a laser cutter and engraver. Every material is different, but at least I have now some good ‘rule of thumb’ values determined for my machine.

The small oscillation of the laser head is something I can reduce with slower speed settings. Maybe I find a way to mechanically optimize this so I can run vector engraving with higher speed.

The amount of laser power I really can use out of my machine is around 15% less than what would be the theoretical maximum, and no surprise to me. So it does not make sense to use the machine above that 80-85%. I keep the machine running below that percentage, and I hope this will extend the tube lifetime too.

Happy Lasering 🙂

Links

• RDWorks Learning Lab 22 The 50 watt fraud a lesson learned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQDCy-mPNqA
• Getting Control over a 50 Watt CO2 Laser Cutter from China
• Laser Engraving for a Card Box