Watch the Sparks Fly! Annealing a 4-holed Stainless Steel Tag
Wood smells good but steel is where the fun is in the laser marking and annealing business. In this case, I permanently laser annealed my CNCROi.com business card onto one of our stock 4 corner holed stainless steel tags.
I saw sparks before using our flexx lens that came with our customized Austrian large format CNC laser, it’s great for both our fiber and CO2 laser source, but our new fiber only lens really does a fantastic job even if the material gets a bit out of focus. This tends to happen with my business cards because of the large black stripe, there is so much heat going into this space that the metal tends to curl.
After the annealing process is finished, you end-up with a very rough-looking tag, it needs to be cleaned using BBQ fluid. I’ve tried many other products but this by far removes all the grime with the least effort. My business card is a very good case study because it has a number of things built-into its design to test various CNC laser parameters but I’ll write about that later.
In this case, our tag is very thin and our laser does a wonderful job causing abrasion on the surface, which, during the cleaning process, filles-up with cotton fibers. This isn’t a problem as it’s easily burned off using a torch as you can see from the picture below.
A very nice, dark and permanent tag that will stand-up to years of vibration, sun and low corrosion environments (we can make these out of stronger SS316 for high corrosion environments)! Let’s compare that to a thicker 304 Stainless Steel tag we have in stock that is more hardy – the picture above is about 1 mm thick while the one below is almost 3x that! Perfect for welding while the above is best suited for tacking or riveting. The one below has a smooth surface, easy to clean and also available to any size or speck you need while the one above is cheaper material wise but takes about the same amount of laser time.
CNCROi.com has extensive experience making tags of all kinds for the industrial market and have in stock a host of different options from raw stainless steel to anodized aluminium and if you need something powder coated (clear or colored) we can also help you out too! Give us a call or email with your application and we’ll get back to you with a solution that suits your exact application and need.
CNCROi.com: Laser Annealing Thin 4-Holed Stainless Steel Tag
