New to laser engraving.........speed question

Creality Falcon
1

I have extensive experience with both CNC routers 3D printing but am brand new to laser engraving/cutting. As an introduction I bought a CR-Laser Falcon 5 watt (on sale on Amazon) just to get my feet wet so to speak. It’s assembled and I’ve done the first engraving with the .gcode test file of the Crealty logo that was included.

It all seemed to work well but the extremely slow speed surprised me. I’m going from CNC operation that sent the Z-axis head only along a specified route (vectors) while the laser seems to be acting upon individual pixel points of a raster image, thus requiring it to cover the entire engraving area, in effect, one pixel at a time. I should have seen this in advance but didn’t really think it through.

I’ve been engraving clear acrylic on the CNC router and was thinking it would be faster with a laser engraver. Now I’m not so sure. I experimented with editing the G-code of the test file to bring the default S3000F750 up to S10000F950 and it did speed things up. But even at that it seemed to be taking way longer than the CNC router. With the 10000 mm/m being the max speed of the 5 watt Falcon I’m thinking this isn’t going to be any kind of step up from the CNC router speed wise.

So am I pounding sand thinking the 5 watt Falcon laser will be worthwhile for the project? Or am I just too inexperienced with the possible settings. I haven’t even downloaded either of the two mentioned software packages yet.

Or should I just learn what I can from the 5 watt Falcon and then invest $500 or more in a more substantial, more powerful laser engraving setup.

Thanks,

BH

2

For raster images, this line by line engraving is common. If you have a vector like file you can generate paths that follow these along in Lightburn for example.
The advantage of a 5W laser is that it has a relatively fine focus point. It’s great for fine engraving. 20W, 40W or 60W variants are faster but less precise (multiple combined laser diodes → slightly bigger focus point), you would mainly use them for laser cutting not engraving.
I’m not sure what kind of projects you are planning. For home use I would just start the engraving process and let it do its thing. If you want to produce lots of engravings because you want to sell those and need a high output volume, a 5W diode laser might not be the best choice for that.

3

Well, if I can work from a vector file like on the CNC router that would speed things up substantially. I’ll look into the software end of this next. Your guidance is very much appreciated.

BH

4

Thank you again for helping out the other day. I’m running vector files now and the items are being engraved in seconds vs. minutes. All the difference in the world.

Again, your help was very much appreciated.

BH