445nm burning abilities for a project?

Does anyone know how fast you can fully slice through 1-2mm thick black plastic with these lasers set to 600-900mA?

Thers many DIY tutorials on how to rip apart 2 scanners and make a X-Y table CNC machine. You get a program for your computer that uses Parallel ports. You tell the program that X steps is equal to one inch, and it goes off that...Very simple connections, just transistors - no microcontrollers are needed.

I think if this diode can cut black plastic at a good rate, it would be a great experiment to make a CNC plastic cutting machine. We could use a fiber cable to feed the laser to the aperture on the X-Y grid...Using a Aixiz lens to focus it. This way, with a 1cm clearance and a fan to blow dust out of the lens, we could get a cool cutter

Not to mention if you added adjustable power, you could make a decal etcher for other materials, such as wood...paper..labeling items..etc.

I might try this project over the summer. I'm lacking a computer with parallel ports, but i might consider getting a windows 98 for ~$10 for just running the app. I can get 2 scanners EASILY for under 20 dollars.

I am also quite interested in this idea. I started with a 1W IR diode a month or so ago, but the beam characteristics were pretty poor and there was a thread started about looking for corrective optics, and it just became more work than it was worth. Depending on how nice of a dot this laser can produce, it could be used to make very precise cuts with such a machine, and I've been needing a CNC device to cut solder stencils (probably from relatively thin black plastic), so I can do surface mount soldering of impossible to hand-solder components like LGAs. Plus I prefer the idea of at least working with a visible light laser rather than an IR one.

Sorry, ain't gonna happen.

Focusing the laser to a pin prick sized dot is no problem, which is what you will need to do, but it still won't cut fast enough to be anywhere near useful.

You would need about 10 watts for a start.

rev0 said:

I am also quite interested in this idea. I started with a 1W IR diode a month or so ago, but the beam characteristics were pretty poor

Click to expand...

Same with the 445nm diode. The beam is a line, like most multimode diodes. No one has come up with an option to round out the beam yet. But give em time. If WL can figure it out, I'm sure we will too.

if your worried about the beam just use an arctic but 1Watt is not as an amazing power as it seems. it will cut but it will not be fast... sorry

445's have the capability to burn things other than dark coloured objects, correct?

These are multmode, but not bad, you will need a cylinder lens or anamorphic prisms to round the beam. they work very nice for engraving stuff at slow speed, but cutting isn't going to happen realistically.

It's actually very easy if you know what you are doing place the diode in the heatsink, focus to the sharpest line, then correct the fast axis with a weak cylinder lens... alternately, use a stronger tiny cylinder lens to make the beam output a square blob, then use an axiz style lens to bring it in the rest of the way. The anamorphics are trickier, but give you a better beam spot than the cylinder lenses suitable for things like graphics light shows.

bump

Peace,
dave