The Shop > Tools
Laser Marking Steel
awemawson:
I'm reviving this thread as I've been doing a bit more work on the subject.
I needed to make a label for my Flail Mower - chose to use Aluminium, and totally failed to produce a result. Ended up using non-optimal settings on Stainless Steel resulting is it taking over 6 hours to scan / laser a label. Hence wanting to see what's what and find some optimal conditions to use in the future.
Now my Laser Engraver is a 60 watt model so if you are using a different one you'll need to scale things accordingly.
First I produced a set of twelve sets of text, defined with power ratings ranging from 25% to 100& and travel speeds of 25 mm/Sec up to 75 mm/Sec
Then I prepared a sheet of aluminium, sprayed it with a good coat of 'Dry Moly' by Ambersil and lasered it. The theory is that the Moly bonds to the underlying surface when hit by the laser and any unbonded remnants are cleaned off with acetone.
The results confirmed my suspicion that this process does not work with Aluminium :bang: As you can see NONE of the Moly bonded to the aluminium - zilch, nowt at any of a wide range of settings :scratch:
awemawson:
So now to repeat the process with Stainless Steel.
Good results this time - only a finished photo - sorry I forgot to take a pre-acetone cleaning one but it looked just like the Aluminium.
From my tests it seems that a travel speed of 75 mm/Sec with a laser power of 50% is the optimum for laser life and time taken - overall a good test and one I should have done years ago !
The resulting bonding seems VERY tough - I cannot scratch the 'blackness' off the substrate.
John Stevenson:
No the moly only seems to work with ferrous materials.
The Cermark will work with anything but the idea is to find something cheaper.
If you want to so aluminium then just get some anodised plate and laser the coating off.
You will always get silver letters though so you need a good contrast colour like black or blue.
Like this:-
Not mine stole it off a web site but that is typical.
Good thing nowadays is that the lasers are getting so popular that a whole industry has spring up to supply materials. One of the better ones in the UK is www.908ltd.co.uk
On a different note I did read lately where some people have had decent results sticking a layer of Kapton tape that is used as bed substrate on 3D printers.
Not having any I haven't tried it, I did ask if it would do brass which is one of the hardest common material I have found to mark but no reply yet.
So Andrew seeing as you are at least 17s and 6d in front of me, that's your next project ? :wave:
John Stevenson:
Forgot to add, don't use plain silver anodising as with the silver letters it will look like an Italian flag
awemawson:
Thought I'd give the anodised aluminium a try - seems ok on a first test using the same varied settings as before
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