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What is recommended safety measures with fiber lasers around 300 - 500 watts?

csspecs

Aluminum
Joined
Nov 22, 2010
Location
Central Florida USA
I'm looking to get a fiber laser on a roughly 4x8 table. I have a few machines picked out to get samples from. Most of the machines are open with no real guarding, I had read some comment that basically sounded like having a fiber unit outside of a full enclosure was super unsafe.

Yet I see a lot of videos around the net of people running open machines and seem to just be wearing the laser glasses.

I get a lot of conflicting answers regarding this. Is there anything exceptionally dangerous being given off that needs to be contained?
 
yeah, personally i would be uncomfortable around that. CO2 lasers that are open are one hell of a lot safer, the beam is absorbed by the water in your eye ball, mild low powered reflections that is, not a full on beam straight in the eye ball! Fibre depending on the wave length is not and will cause major damage to the retina, stuff that and your blind! Hence why most of the industrial machines are fully enclosed. At least here in europe, a fibre laser cutting setup will have a complete enclosure with roof, CO2 and the enclosure is normally just enough to keep the operator out of the movement hazard area. A lot of radiant reflection is down to just what your cutting though, some materials its a lot less of a hazard, think of it like shining a torch in a room with black walls compared to a room full of mirrors. Key thing to remember, laser light is reflected very differently by different materials, slight differences in wave length really change thoes risks.

300-500 watts is low power for cutting metals though. normally most metal cutting set-ups are in the 1-2Kw range minimum.

Generally by far the greatest danger with a laser is not the beam though, but the fumes and mechanical hazards of the cnc side of things. Enclsure design greatly impacts fume containment, its way easier to get great extraction levels when your sucking fume out of one end of a sealed box with a air inlet the other, its a lot less effective on a open bed style setup.
 
Exactly, bond should be in a proper enclosure with suitable fume extraction, with correct laser protection goggles so he's not blinded, the bad guy should also be wearing eye protection, respiratory protection and needs to be careful were he waggles that finger if he wants to keep it!

Whats more the beams totaly invisible, but i guess that does not make for good torture.
 
DO NOT LOOK INTO BEAM WITH REMAINING EYE!
500 watts will do if all you cut is 16 gauge or less. Maybe. Or 500 watts may just piss you off. 1000 watt minimum, more if you can afford it. More wattage equates to thicker metals and/or greater speed. Better edge finish with higher power too. The wave length of most fiber lasers is easily absorbed by metal with little or no reflection. I cut mirror finish copper like it was butter with my 1000 watt Bodor Laser. Polished stainless too. No full enclosure on my 5 x 10 machine and no extraction either, not yet but very soon. Just using it for tiny projects at present but soon to be moved and connected to a 5 hp+ extractor.
 
Pretty sure you can buy direct, but you are on your own when it comes to setting it up and learning how to use it. I bought mine through Laguna tools in Ca. They received it, tested it, shipped it to me and set it up and trained me. Possibility if I want more than 1000 watts I will buy a small bed model direct with more powerful laser and swap the lasers. Or keep powerful laser in small bed machine. Like some users, lots of parts done a few at a time.
 
Looks like I'm going to go with an enclosed unit.. I went and saw a demo unit and it produced the parts well.
I was originally going to go with a 4x8 or 5x10 table, but most of the parts I make are on the small side, so nesting works pretty well. On a 4x4 machine my max loss with the worst planning is 4 inches per 4x4 sheet, and more likely less than 1 inch per sheet.. I figured that with a loss of 4" per 4x4' square it would take 20,000 4x4 sheets before I would be saving money with the larger unit. Also will take up less space and I could in theory shear all the sheets down when they come in and have them take up significantly less space.
 
My experience is with a YAG laser at 1064 nm, 600 watts CW 1 megawatt pulsed. From the replies you got already I would not trust any of their replies. You asked about fiber lasers. I don't have any direct knowledge of fiber lasers but they are in the same range as the YAG laser. Being solid state there is no gases to worry about. So depending on the power output, I would say you need to be eyesafe and isolate any power supplies from direct contact. Here is a site that discusses Fiber lasers: Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology - fiber lasers, fibre, rare-earth, doped, high power, erbium, neodymium, ytterbium, thulium
It may be a little too technical but over all the eyesafe goggles are the one thing you must have. I say goggles because most glasses do not protect the eyes from a reflected beam. Since the beam is invisible you should not take chances. Also make sure the eye protection you choose is marked for the wavelength of the laser you are using. Your safety is your responsibility, so act accordingly and you can't go wrong.
 
Ended up going with a 4x4' table enclosed fiber laser from rose graphix out of south Florida, I'm in central FL so we drove down and got a demo on one of their machines before buying.. Been running for about three weeks now with no issues other than your usual figuring out a new machine, machine uses cypcut for the programing and a windows computer interface.

The tech was pretty good at getting everything setup but was there was a bit of a language barrier on some technical questions but we eventually got it puzzled out. The software did not really require a lot of CNC knowledge, having about two years of working with a Haas mini VMC which had a STEEP learning curve, firing up the laser was basically like turning on a printer..

I've learned basically everything I know about metal work from forums and youtube videos, and basically have never given back anything.
Anyway me and my brother are setting up a little youtube channel to supply some information about the machine, we only found a couple of videos in english and they only had the machines making parts and supplied very little information about what the units could actually do and how to squeeze the best performance out of them.. I'll post a link when I get the first one done.. The channel will not be monetized I just want to help the next guy stuck with a supplier giving them trouble.

As for the original safety question.. An enclosed unit, laser glasses and a decent smoke/fume extractor basically get the job done.. Could be a little better but I'm pretty happy with the machine I got.
 
Ok well Machine has been in my shop since December 8th of 2017. Been pretty decent, we don't make tons of parts... Well actually we have processed about 5 ton of sheet give or take a little, mostly 22ga, some 20,18,16,14 and one little chunk of 1/4".

Total value of the parts cut to date, from my previous suppler would have been $29,000 plus about $3,500 in LTL freight costs... Naturally the steel did cost something as did the O2 we are using, steel looks to be about $8,000 and gas was around $1700 plus the lease on the bottles.. So roughly a savings of $22,000 so that was pretty nice. But the big savings was having parts nearly instantly, parts I would wait between 4-6 weeks for I have coming out of the machine within minutes.. Because of this massive reduction in turn around time we have been able to react to market changes in weeks instead of months, we can do half batches as there is no penalty for making small runs.. In all the machine saved roughly $22,000 in cut costs and increased profits by roughly $79,000 due to increased sales and no outages... Overall I'm very pleased.

Anyway here is the channel.. I've kinda hit the limit of what can be covered, laser cutting is not like milling, basically you work out the speed and asist pressure and that is it..
4x4 5 watt fiber laser
- YouTube
 
One thing i will point out, you sure have a lot of bed slats in there, generaly the less slats you run the less splatter - bounce back on the back of parts, if your tagging is solidly reliable, you may find it well worth while removing at least every other one if not every 2 out of 3. Instead of marks, some simple drop down hinge up sheet stops can realy speed loading, just lay the sheet on and push it into them and flip them out the way and your off, realy helps with a 12'x6' laser, spose a 4x4' is a lot easier to handle

How much roughly was the laser? Only thing i would say your 22K saving is not including any labour or machine wear, you need to factor that in long term or your potentially screwing your self. Also that seams a high gas cost, you must be either paying a lot for oxy or getting ripped off on delivery charges, you would do well to look at the manifold cylinder pallets of oxygen, should work out a lot cheaper so long as you have a forklift to take them on - off transport.

I hear you on the 4-6 weeks, its taken me close to 3 years to find a half decent laser supplier that give me a steady reliable sub 8 days turn around. As well as sane pricing and nothing more than a total minimum order charge that for me - my parts is dead easy to do more than 10x per order.
 
I may try removing some of the bed slats, I'm not getting much spatter at all, my concern would be that my tagging is rather small. Currently we pull the sheet, wipe both sides of the sheet to remove dust, then two of us lift the sheet and give it a shake and the parts rain out.. So if I remove slates I would probably need to increase my tags.

Sheet locating is pretty easy maybe 15 seconds per sheet in production. I don't get very close to the edge of the sheet, we found it cost more in handling time than it saved in metal. The 4x4 size is really easy to handle, since most of my stuff was really small parts it really has worked well.

The gas I did not have easy access to the receipts, so I may be a little on the high side.. My gas costs are $35 per tank for a 300-size bottle. Delivery is $15 but I almost never use that, Airgas is about a block away from my heat treatment shop so I just toss the empties on and swap them out whenever I'm heading that way. I get about 3-4.5 hours per tank depending on how much piercing I have to do.. A normal batch uses 3-4 tanks and I have six tanks.
There are not many options for Gas companies near me to get other prices. I do have a friend that is paying $15 per tank for the same size of O2 with the fees all waived, so if I can figure out how to get my tanks swapped with his I'll be saving a lot.

Machine was $47,000 from rose graphix (lasers are now under bescutter). Same machine is now $54,000 due to tariffs... If I could rewind back to when I ordered, the only change I would make would be getting the 750 watt instead of the 500 watt. I think the extra money would be worth it for the increased versatility.

As for labor and cost of replacement. Yeah there is some labor, but we had labor with the ordered in parts as well. We had to clean every part before they could be used because they had laser dust still on them. We remove the laser dust from the whole sheet before removing the parts. So the labor of inserting the sheet, cleaning the sheet and stripping the parts is about equal to the time of just cleaning the parts individually.. Estimated yearly savings basically allow for replacement every two years. I figure the machine will last longer than that.

When we bought the machine we had an established history of using laser cut parts. Our total for laser cut parts in the five years we used the same supplier we ordered $90,000+ in laser cut parts, something like 120,000 individual parts.. In the last year (2017) we had ordered $29,000 in parts.. This year we should hit, $42,000 in parts, and that does not factor the tariff increases that would have no doubt increased the part cost.

The really BIG savings was not having idle times waiting for parts. Laser cut steel parts must be processed quickly to prevent rusting. So we would guess our processing time and allow one week for production issues for the next orders arrival. Sometimes we would complete a batch a week or two faster, or there could be a delay on the delivery. One time we finished a batch early and the next batch of parts was lost in shipping. Which resulted in nearly 9 weeks of idle time, we made some parts to have something to do but the bulk of the work had to wait until the laser cut parts arrived.
Now we start up the laser, and in 10-15 minutes the first parts are coming out, and the shop fires up. We have been running for nearly nine months with the laser and the only idle time we had was for a planned shutdown for vacations.


I will say that there is a risk in owning a large and fairly expensive machine. If my laser cutting supplier had been able to deliver parts inside of 10 days, I would never have bought a laser.. But now that I own one, our production methods have really morphed around the machine, to the point that I will probably always have one.
 
The 4x4' fully enclosed 1000 watt fiber from Rose / bescutter.com shows as $73,000. Laguna wants around $140,000 for a visually and functionally similar machine made by Bodor. That's quite a spread for what to my eye is the difference in support between two U.S. based importers.

Laguna is a long time importer of high end tools. Chinese lasers are a new thing for them but I give the benefit of the doubt their intent is to ensure the same level of support and satisfaction as they've done for decades for buyers of $5000 Euro woodworking tools.

Rose that I can tell is pretty new, and built around sales and support of a few lines of Chinese cnc machines.

This is a pretty speculative assessment on my part. Any thoughts on what really gives?

Also, with this class of machines, it's not so clear that watts are watts. Some machines offered with 1000 watt fiber lasers are really pulsed, with low duty cycles, so as to avoid the more expensive ways of cooling it.
 
^ Most laser sources are pulsed though, even the CO2's i have been around were always pulsed in the cut, whilst i believe they cut be ran at 100% its just not how good cutting seamed to work.

Don't get too hung up on duty cycle either, a laser cutter will never ever hit 100% laser on cutting typical parts. $54K is getting pretty dang affordable too, no doubt prices will continue to fall, but it was not all that many years ago a 2Kw co2 would set you back a significant fraction of a million $ and im pretty sure the 4Kw class fibres my supplier uses are circa $300-400,000 machines, these kinda price points are realy going to destroy the second hand laser marketplace over here too. Especially when you factor in just how much cheaper a fibre is to run, CO2's with there constant beam path nitrogen purge, high maintenance and regular expensive servicing needs and ability to consume electric unlike any other machine i have ever encountered. Going to be interesting to see just how dang cheap fibre laser sources can become.

Sorry yes if your cutting steel the blow backs not too much of a issue, its more on stainless that its a killa, tends to really stick to the back of the sheet unlike carbon steel slag which just does not, this becomes a real pain in the ass if your trying to cut pre polished sheet on nitrogen.
 
The 4x4' fully enclosed 1000 watt fiber from Rose / bescutter.com shows as $73,000. Laguna wants around $140,000 for a visually and functionally similar machine made by Bodor. That's quite a spread for what to my eye is the difference in support between two U.S. based importers.

Laguna is a long time importer of high end tools. Chinese lasers are a new thing for them but I give the benefit of the doubt their intent is to ensure the same level of support and satisfaction as they've done for decades for buyers of $5000 Euro woodworking tools.

Rose that I can tell is pretty new, and built around sales and support of a few lines of Chinese cnc machines.

This is a pretty speculative assessment on my part. Any thoughts on what really gives?

Also, with this class of machines, it's not so clear that watts are watts. Some machines offered with 1000 watt fiber lasers are really pulsed, with low duty cycles, so as to avoid the more expensive ways of cooling it.

The Bodor is probably made on a cast iron frame. My Rose graphix/BEScutter machine is from what I can tell is a Senfeng machine model number SF1313FL, the frame is fabricated from thick square tube, the top of the frame has about 1.5" thick slabs that are welded and then ground flat.. The laser generator is a Raycus on mine, not sure what the bodor uses.
Also my machine is rack and pinion on all but the Z axis, which is a little faster than ball and a little more accurate.

On a CNC mill a fabricated frame would be a huge NO!! but on a laser I can't see why it would matter, the laser is not generating a bunch of vibrations or anything. The bodor does seem to be aimed at the high end market, made to look really modern and clean, they look like the type of machine a tech startup would buy, they are really flashy with what looks like automotive grade paint jobs.. The Senfeng is kinda dressed up, but when you get close to it you can see the metal work is "industrial grade", lumpy and bumpy here and there on the encloser.. Not that it really matters, its a metal box that keeps the smoke and sparks inside.

There are some odd things on the machine, odd wiring and construction methods but so far we have been able to deal with any issues pretty easy. Sometimes I remind myself that it was $50,000 cheaper than the next option and I just ignore whatever minor detail is annoying me.. Even with the odd things I wish we bought the machine two years sooner, we would have saved/made so much more money, not wasted $8400 on a punch press that is totally obsolete now. Basically the same story as when we got our HAAS VMC, owning that machine has turned my Bridgeport into a coat hanger.. Now the only sheet metal tool I use is a shear to turn 4x8 sheets into 4x4 sheets.

If anyone is thinking about buying one and wants to see one that is being used for more than demos before forking over $54K or $140K or more. I'm about an hour north of Orlando and 30 minutes south of Daytona. Pretty easy to combo a vacation with checking out a machine. Boss laser is near me in Sanford about 15 minutes south so if you want to comparison shop.. Not like I care, I'm not a machine seller I just own one and like it... Just google my user name and you'll find my website for the gun stuff I make, use the contact page say you want to see the laser and send your phone number.

Like I said earlier, I've been benefiting from other peoples posts for a decade.. More than happy to pay some back.
 
Yeah you don't want mass on anything but the stationary part of any plasma - flame - laser cutting setup, cut forces are insignificant, its all about acceleration in some way more than top speed, thats what gives you great nicely cut sharper corners, its why some of the realy fast lasers have a smaller sub head. Pretty sure one of the big names was going to carbon fibre for the gantry for weight reductions and improved stiffness. Linear drives are also pretty common and do real well in these kinda applications, though probaly a bit out side the chinese price point were looking at here.

FYI theres some pretty serious cnc mills out there with fabricated frames, just there not made out of box section or plates bent on a typical press brake!
 








 
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