Looking for Fiber Laser for silver, brass

[Sundar]

Hello,

We are searching for a job shop who can laser cut small parts on a continual basis. Parts are 1.25" x 1.75" and smaller. Parts will be cut from sterling silver at .025", and brass at .032".

Believe it or not, I have been searching for a vendor to cut these parts for over a year now. At this point it seems clear that a "normal" Co2 laser cannot do this, that we are in need of a high powered pulse yag or fiber laser. I have contacted every manufacturer that I could find who sells these lasers for a list of job shops, and done exhaustive searches for job shops separately as well. So far we have found only 2 job shops in the entire United States who can cleanly penetrate the material. I am talking with a couple more who think they can but have yet to prove it. I have a massive list of companies who cannot. The reason that I am writing is that the companies that we have found, their quotes are not cheap (many many times the cost of cutting other easy materials like steel). They are used to dealing with aerospace and other high end industries. At this point we cannot afford these services, our overhead would be too high to offer our product.


Acid etch has also proven to be a possibility, but it is not ideal, as the minimum orders are much higher and material recovery is less possible. Waterjet has proven to not be fine enough, even the omax mini jets, the smallest on the market that we could find, had too thick of a kerf for our parts.

Please- if you can help or know of someone who can, let me know. If our company takes off we will be looking to buy our own machine, but in the interim this is out only option.

Thank you so much for your help.

[ellalaser]

hello, this is Ella from Golden Laser, a listed manufacturer of medium and small power laser equipment in China, we have yag laser and fiber laser cutters for commercial use. i'm not in sales dept, maybe u can give me ur email address and contact infor, i can have our sales engineer contact u, they are much more professional than i am. or u can send us samples, we can test and then send back to u, limu@goldenlaser.org

[mcphill]

Try these contacts:

Laser Cutting, Laser Welding and Laser Marking Services by Rache Corporation of California - Located in California

LaserScribe: The Laser Engraving Specialists - Located in Indiana

They should both be able to do your work.

[Sundar]

Ella,
Thank you for your response. I have sent you an email.

Mcphill- I can't thank you enough for your referrals. While laser scribe said that they cannot do cutting, Rache is looking like a serious possibility. We really appreciate the help!


For anybody else out there who reads this, we are still looking for more job shops. It's looking now like NdYag is the way to go to get through the silver, under 300 watts. Any help is so much appreciated.

Best,
Sundar

[mcphill]

Glad I could (maybe) help! Tell Rache that "the DEFCON guy" sent you

[Sundar]

Well, still no luck guys. We have found a couple machines/shops that can do it, but they are either extremely slow and expensive given our material or are in aerospace or medial industries and are used to very expensive production runs.

Does anybody else have any ideas?

[RossMosh]

I think you're getting the run around or you're calling the wrong places. A high wattage laser cutter should rip through that thin brass or silver. These same machines cut through REALLY thick stuff. I know all about how heat disperses differently in brass and silver but you're talking about thin stock. This should not be an issue.

Another machine that should be able to cut this stuff easily is a water jet. It will cut through that stuff no problem what-so-ever.

In the end, I have an impression that you are probably expecting the price to be much cheaper than what it should be. I could be dead wrong about this, but if you can't find anyone in your price range, normally your price range is wrong.

A CNC router would also be able to handle the job. It's probably significantly slower than a laser or a water jet but there are a LOT more routers in the world than high powered lasers or water jets. You could honestly build or buy a CNC router capable of doing this job for around $3,000-10,000. Again, this is thin stock that is relatively soft. Shouldn't be an issue for a decent router. the biggest issue will be holding down the material (you'll probably want to go with a vac table).