laser air assit testing

[swester]

Here are the results from playing with different types of Air assists. I ran them on a 35 watt Epilog Radius, 1/8 inch birch plywood. I have a test program I wrote that does a grid of 70 power/speed changes at once for evaluating cutting of materials. Rate was set at 50%. Cutting threw was 20% faster with air assist, the axial air assist in my case only helped a little for cutting speed all the way threw, but I think there was a VERY good improvement of the edge quality. The last picture is the air nozzle I made. It is acrylic 1/8 and ¼ thick, I used acrylic cement (paint stripper) to glue it, and just got longer metric screw to hold it in place.
Axial Air assist, very little surface charring

Standard Air assist, lots of surface charring


No air assist, LOTS of charring

Picture of nozzle on machine