Hi,
i am currently owning the 10W laser and the 40W laser and started cutting wood now for some things.
I’ve read that the 40W laser is producing lots of fume in the chamber and therefore a more powerful fan is highly recommended.
I did not have it so far, so i would stick with the 10W until the order of the fan arrived.
Until then, can i simply use the 10W laser to cut the thicker wood by using two passes instead of a single pass?
Or doesn’t that make sense at all?
Yes, that can be done. Ideally, divide the number of passes by the thickness of the material, and that’s your step down amount each pass.
IE: 8mm material, 2 passes, 4mm step down.
That way the second pass the module steps down 4mm and refocusses half way though to cut the rest of the material.
Thanks, i will give it a try.
Hi there, just following up on this question. Doesn’t the laser have a specific depth it can reliably cut to, considering the beam spread and loss of focus at greater depths?
I’m debating whether to go for the 40W laser, and I’ve got just 36 hours left to decide before the sale ends!
Yes, that’s the case. The beam is most effective in the focal point, and will be larger the further away you get from this point. Still, the beam is narrow, so the efficient region is not too small, depending of course what exactly you want to achieve. If you do multi-pass operations, you can decide that every pass runs at a different height to make most use of the focal point. The 40W unfortunately has been designed in a way that you only have ~5mm to go deeper… Snapmaker has a strange tendency to build their housings of the lasers in a way that they are very close to the workpiece.
When considering the 40W, I’d recommend to also take a few more things into account: Which materials do you want to work with? What kind of jobs do you plan? The 40W is extremely powerful for cutting, but has a comparitively large focal point, which limits the details you get when engraving. For very detailed engraving the 1064nm 2W laser is best, but it cannot really do wood. I like this page: laser modules comparison – Snapmaker - it allows you to take a good decision.