How does a laser cutter work? A laser cutter uses an extremely powerful beam of focused light and projects this onto a sheet of material. This light beam has so much energy that it melts or vaporizes the sheet material, leaving a cut in its wake.
Laser cutting does have a high tolerance, especially when cutting thin sheet materials. It does have some difficulty cutting multilayered or thick material as the beam may start to refract on those materials.
To get something laser cut, you need a CAD file, to base the cut path off or a vector file that mathematically describe the cutting path’s line work. This could be a DWG, DXF or CDR file type.
The speed of the cut varies, as it depends on the material and the energy required to cut all the way through it. Thicker, tougher materials will take longer to cut. Also the laser cutting operator may push the limits of the machine to make it cut faster. As a rule of thumb, you could guess a laser cutter would cut somewhere between 2.5 to 12 meters per minute.
A frequent problem with laser cutting is that polished or reflective surfaces act as mirrors and reflect the laser beam off the sheet material. If possible do not polish the target part.
Laser cutting is particularly well suited to cutting ceramics and some glass as it’s incredibly difficult to cut these materials with any other method. It’s frequently used in cutting paper, woods and plastics. On industrial scales, you can cut hard steels, such as carbon steel or stainless. Other metals a little more difficult as they often conduct heat well. These include copper, aluminium, gold and silver.
Laser cutting is a high tolerance cutting method. On thin substrates, you can get as finer detail as a Ø0.025mm hole. However, as precision increases, cut time also increases. There is usually very little machine maintenance as it’s a non-contact cutting method.
If you’d like to learn more about Laser cutting or if you something that needs to be precisely cut, please don’t hesitate to contact us about a free 1-hour meeting.
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