CNC Laser Engraving a Wood Log Top
CNCROi.com hasn’t posted many projects here showcasing how big an object, in this case, a wood log top, we can actually put in our Austrian CNC so here’s one that showcases vertical distance within our laser.
As mentioned, the biggest thing we’ve put into our laser thus far was a meter wide by 3 meters long, it passed straight through the machine (video coming soon). But that’s only half the story, the other half is a vertical distance.
Say you have a large object that needs to be CNC laser engraved or fiber marked (we have both a CO2 and fiber laser in our machine), how big can we get into it? You can read an earlier post focusing on that end of things here.
This time around, our vacuum bed was too “high” to allow the log I wanted to engrave the top of into the machine. You’ll notice the back is closed in the above picture vs the one above this picture, this is to ensure proper extraction of the wood resin and fumes from the heating caused by our industrial CNC laser.
The solution in this case is simple, remove the top of our table, exposing the vacuum vents underneath! This actually removed more vertical height than envisioned so after this was done, the table actually had to be brought up to be in focus on the log. 14 inches is roughly 35 cm.
The log was cut by hand, so it was anything but straight, some creative lifts on one side solved that issue. As this material is wood, we have A LOT of play regarding focus, if we were annealing a stainless steel cylinder of the same shape, the set-up would take dramatically longer as we’d only have about 1 mm of tolerance before the annealing was out of focus (thus, not annealing evenly). With wood, just throw more power, even if out of focus, and you’ll get some vaporization going on!
Originally the focus was going to be dead center on the log but the log wasn’t symmetrical, so it was a put a bit more to the left for esthetic reasons. We still had full extraction and gas kit going to remove as much resin as possible during CNC laser production.
That being said, we still wanted to get some good contrast going onto the log so the settings were slowed down a bit on purpose, producing a lot more smoke and vapor, to really showcase what our Austrian CNC laser can do!
The reason the head is always blurry in these photos is due to the fact that it’s so fast! It has up to 5G acceleration and moves 3.5 meters a second!
You may think that something moving so fast would cause a lot of sway in our CNC laser but our machine has a solid steel frame and weighs north of 350 kg. It’s going nowhere!
Swaying is something to consider, as if the whole machine sways (which ours doesn’t), it means the bed is moving too, which directly affects the part you are engraving, etching or marking. If your parts are swaying under the laser, you WILL NOT get consistent, repeatable and dependable results.
As the CNCROi.com CNC laser was finishing-up it’s engraving, the speed of the head didn’t. There is less smoke in the above picture as there is less area being engraved into.
The results look spectacular! There is a bit of resin on the surface of the log but nothing that can’t be easily sanded off (if the surface was flat to begin with). You see no noticeable gradations in the engraving depth, where CNCROi.com is located, it’s almost a cm higher than the top of the leaf in the back.
Looking at the CNC laser engraving from another angle, you can see no other part of the log was damaged during this process. Our system is completely contact-less which means everything we do is permanent and everything we do never actually gets touched by the CNC laser. Unlike a router, where there is direct contact between the bit and the material being subtracted.
Looks awesome! You can clearly see the wood grain, it wasn’t filled-in or affected in any way. Our wide format industrial CNC laser actually made the wood grain come out better! Where will this log end-up? In the fireplace!
Have a CNC laser project that you want a passionate company to handle for you? Contact CNCROi.com today! We love this stuff! Here’s a project we did a little while back, pioneer bling as we call it!
