Fiber laser cutting machine is a newly emerging laser cutting method in the last decade, during which the metal cutting technology has been updated by virtue of its profession in metal sheets and pipes cutting field. Many metal equipment manufacturing companies have introduced this kind of cutting technology to upgrade their business, and most of them have earned profits and convenience from it. If you are rightly considering to get a fiber laser cutting machine, 3 questions should be figured out to ensure the practicability and performance of the machine before your investment.
1. Why different auxiliary gases are used to cut stainless steel and carbon steel?
Customers who are familiar with fiber laser metal cutting machine know that different auxiliary gases are utilized to cut different metal types – nitrogen is used to cut stainless steel and oxygen is used to cut carbon steel. But most of them may have no clear ideas about the reason.
This mainly results from the different component content in the metals. Due to that there is less carbon content together with some rare metal content like chrome, nickel, molybdenum in stainless steel, nitrogen is enough to assist finishing the cutting process. While carbon steel has a high quantity of carbon content, which needs oxygen to give a combustion-supporting power to achieve better cutting results. Do not blend these two gases together or use wrong gas to cut stainless steel/carbon steel, which will cause bad cutting effect and waste your materials.
2. How to set up the cutting parameters when processing galvanized sheet?
Many customers buy fiber laser cutters to process galvanized sheets which have two different cutting situations. For those 1-2mm galvanized sheets, the cutting parameters and auxiliary gases are the same with that of stainless steel. And as for cutting over 2mm galvanized sheets, the cutting parameters should be set by referring to carbon steel. Hence users have to adjust cutting parameters to process galvanized sheets of different thickness.
3. If I want to cut high reflective metals, how should I choose the fiber laser cutter?
When cutting the high reflective metals, the work piece will reflect the laser beams back to the laser head via the optical path, causing great damage to the fiber laser generator. Common high reflective metals consist of aluminum, brass, red copper, etc, which requires users to choose professional fiber laser cutting machine manufacturers whose machines are equipped with high quality laser generator and strict quality guarantee. More information about how to cut high reflective metals with fiber laser cutter, this post will give useful details for your reference.
As a senior fiber laser cutting machine manufacturer, we provide 3 years warranty for the whole machine body and 2 years for the laser generator for customers. Meantime, our machines adopt American nLIGHT laser generator, a famous fiber laser brand with specified quality guarantee, to process high reflective metals. Customers won’t worry about the quality and after-sales service of our fiber laser cutting machines.
Has anyone tried cutting sheet metal? Did it work? Did it fail? What was your setup like?
I’m trying to cut a piece of 26 guage zinc coated steel but so far I’m getting too much chatter.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-24-in-x-36-in-26-Gauge-Zinc-Metal-Sheet-/
Aside from milling (which probably cannot work on such hard materials) or plasma (which works well but you need some kind of torch height adjustment), the only option I can think of would be electro erosion.
But I don’t know anyone who tried that before on the MPCNC, so you’ll have to be a pioneer. Good luck!
After some experimenting I managed to get a nice result with reliable reproducibility. I used a 1/8" 4 flute down cut carbide end mill. I ramped into the work at 3 degrees. I initially thought that since the sheet was less than half a millimeter thick, I could plunge straight down into it. I destroyed a few end mills learning this lesson. To eliminate chatter I enabled trochoidal milling. This let me run at a high feed rate of 36mm/s without issue. Trochoidal milling by itself left a very slightly rough finish, so I added a finishing pass of the default value of 5% tool diameter and all cuts were then very smooth. Looks like it can cut steel after all.
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Okay, this is too good. You even have smaller steppers on there. I love it. There has been a bunch of giant nema 17 and nema 23 questions lately and I keep telling them it isn’t needed. Proof. You have absolutely made my day, I have to share this.
Oh how I love being wrong sometimes, I thought it could not be done, just wow.
Here's a video of the cut: https://youtu.be/ZgANd0I24PM
Some more notes I thought of: To secure the sheet to the spoil board I sprayed the back of the sheet with super 77 adhesive so no holding tabs were necessary. As the steel is conductive it was easy to do a z height measurement across the whole sheet at 100mm intervals to adjust the cut depth along the piece. I was able to use pretty aggressive trochoidal settings. I think it was 20% step length and 25% width. I used 0% oscillation because the bottom of the tool was just cutting soft plywood. After I peeled the finished part off I wiped the adhesive off with mineral spirits. No adhesive remained on the bed.
The part is indeed an enclosure. I've since bent it in a brake and attached it to the bottom of a longboard. I've already made some rims for it but they're 3D printed parts to attach gears to the wheels.
I agree that larger steppers are unnecessary. Before I had worked out proper settings and I was getting violent chatter, the steppers were holding fine, the spindle was just vibrating too much.
Oh man, that was perfect. No chatter, the router RPM didn’t budge, seems like you easily had that cut. Way more smooth than my old Aluminum video. Looks like I have some catching up to do.
Thank you so much for the video, the inspiration, proving me wrong, I am stoked! I want to go cut some metal but I am going to be busy making LR2 parts for a while longer.
WOWOWOWOWOWOW
That’s insane.
I never thought it would be possible, and now I feel the urge to try that!!
I think that was the last really hard challenge this machine had to pass, and you passed it with style, with a big machine and a large part perfectly milled.
Congratulations, bravo!
(please make us a little tutorial on how you set it up and the modifications you made to the machine/software to get this result…)
This is awesome! I’m still building my MPCNC, but I have a project to do where I need to cut some sheet metal to fabricate a rounded nose for a stock trailer. I was NOT looking forward to doing all of that by hand! So now I’m moving the MPCNC ahead of it on the project list. Your cuts look a LOT better than I was going to be able to do (and redo after I messed up…LOL). Now, I’m wondering what the upper limit on thickness might be?
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