Cut Condition Help 1

[Polishmafiaboss]

Running an Amada LC-1212-A3 (2KW Fanuc Laser / Fanuc 160iL control). We've had it running now about 9 months mostly cutting 26ga to 13ga stainless and galvanized. We are working on a project for our sister company to cut some parts out of .375CRS. I'm not having much luck with part of it. The tricky part of this is that the part has teeth that we need to make as perfect as we can get them. So far I can either get good edges and crappy teeth or crappy edges and pretty decent teeth. I think I'm to the fine tuning point, but my brain is now mush from trying to figure this out. I'm attaching cut condition tables/edge control table pics and a couple of the best part I've gotten so far. A few notes: (1) we're using O2 (shop air doesn't seem to be a viable option for this part). (2) The parts in the photo were cut using E3 with a M103 pierce that was done 3/8" away from the part with a lead-in. The pierce is acceptable, altho it could be close enough to the part that it is causing thermal spots at that end. (Not sure about that just yet.)

Editics didn't load correctly, I think I got that fixed. Other item to note: In our Cut Condition table, there was NOT an entry for CRS .375. Only went up to .120. So I've been using the HRS .375 condition, which is likely part of my problem.

Any suggestions or observations of the settings would be greatly appreciated. I'm about at the end of O2 bottle #1 and would rather not waste much more trying to dial this in. Once we get it to cut "acceptably", we need to run about 16K of these as quickly as we can!!

Thanks guys!!

 

[drossfree]

gas pressure is too high try 0.2
nozzle gap is too big try 0.15
focus 0.079 seems too high to me this should be about 0.02 (focus is taken from line e1 for all conditions)
also i think your frequency should be higher probably around 1200.

i cant help much more than that it has been about 12 years since i cut mild steel and my machine has a 4kw resonator

 

[Polishmafiaboss]

drossfree, Thanks! I'll give that a shot and see. And I didn't know focus always comes from E1. That might explain why changes we've didn't seem to have any effect on the cuts afterwards.

More testing today. I made a few adjustments to speed that helped the backside of the piece look a lot better. Now the challenge is to get the teeth to cut correctly. I think that's going to be edge & approach control manipulation.

 

[drossfree]

nozzle alignment is extremely important when cutting mild steel. also if your corners are being burned off on the teeth portion of your part you could use corner loops.

 

[Polishmafiaboss]

Messing around with this for almost a week. And from all of the reading I've done, I'm coming to the conclusion that we may be using the wrong lens on the thicker material. Machine came with a 5.0" lens installed. Form reading other forums/threads, I'm beginning to think we should be using a 7.5" lens. Problem with that is I can't find any info on swapping lenses. (Which adapter (if any) to use. Is it a straight swap and make sure the nozzle is centered or are there parameters that need to be adjusted for the different lens?) I may have to see if Amada can send a tech over for a day and do some more training on this machine. It's been almost a year and we haven't had any other issues with it. My head hurts.

 

[drossfree]

oh yes definitely should use 7.5 inch lens

on the left is 5 inch holder the shorter holder is 7.5 inch. the way it is measured is 5 inch from lens to nozzle or 7.5 inch from lens to nozzle. your pic of the cutting condition shows that you are using head #1 which is 7.5 inch

 

[Polishmafiaboss]

Imagine light bulbs lighting up brighter That makes sense. We'll give it a shot and see what we can get to work.
If you have a minute. Could you list what the different head #'s equate to? We've just been running whatever shows up in the cut condition tables "as-is" with the 5" lens installed. That sheds light on a few other things.

I really appreciate the help / explanation!!

 

[drossfree]

i only use the 5inch and the 7.5 inch heads there is a wacs head and an eco cut head but i never use them the wacs head sprays water to cool your cut and the eco cut head is used for very thin material to speed up cutting.
I know #1 is 7.5 inch
And #2 is 5 inch head

As i said i only cut stainless on my machine and with those 2 heads i cut from 26 ga all the way up to 1 inch thick. the amada rep wants my cut conditions for 3/4 and 1 inch but i will not give them to him. my machine is rated to cut up to 1/2 inch and they dont understand how i am able to cut up to 1 inch. lol

 

[Polishmafiaboss]

Making Progress! I bought new lenses for the machine, along with new nozzles. Holy COW what a difference that makes. I think the old ones were bad enough, quality of beam on material was not very good. I haven't been able to work on THIS particular part with the new lens, but having used it on some other parts we needed to make was very enlightening.

The other thing that I noticed, and this very likely changes from machine to machine: Cut Conditions that are IN the machine are not even in the ball park of what the original cut conditions that shipped with the machine show. That very well could be an issue. So that's an avenue I'm going to take when testing some other material we need to produce parts from.

As a note to anyone that may be fairly new to lasers: Good optics and proper nozzle alignment are extremely important. They aren't super cheap, but compared to time and effort wasted trying to dial in a machine to cut parts versus getting a new lens is easily justifiable.

I'm hoping to get back to working on the 3/8" material Monday next week.